On Kronos versus Kairos time…
So… anyway, I’ve been freaking out about getting old. I’m 50 as fuck. It happened last November, the day was just suddenly there like an unexpected wedding where you’re meant to marry yourself and have the right dress and vol au vents, but all you have is The Fear and a sense of diminished bladder control. I’m now 8 months in to the gestation of the mid-life me, and rather like the in-utero equivalent where you’re almost ready to be in the world, I find myself uncertain whether I’ve got all the bits I need. Am I ready for the big ‘hello’? How will I breathe? Who will lovingly wrap me up, feed me and coo over me for the next bit? What the hell is on the other side? What the actual F?
I blogged for several years as Notes from the Edge of Motherhood. The blog was well received. I was part of a fantastic community of women writing and (over)sharing similar things about nappies, school playgrounds and the odd behaviours of offspring and other halves. I got an agent quickly and we did the rounds with publishers for a potential book that never materialised. And so I gave up. Just like that. I got fed up with being skint, decided I was shite, and returned to work. I gathered up all ideas of being creative, of writing, of doing the things that make me happy, and dumped them in a metaphorical parking lot resembling a Brutalist, abandoned, concrete labyrinth, covered in Japanese knot-weed, sealed with un-lockable locks in Caracas where no buses or non-murderers ever go.In true ‘me’ style, I went for it on the work front, quickly getting myself great jobs in exciting companies like Mills & Boon and Disney. I can now afford holidays. At last I have a pension and new bras. I am luckier than many, I made it to 50. I have awesome kids, a great husband, my health, a corporate career at my fingertips, but also this irrefutable sense that I haven’t got it right…yet.
I have renamed this blog Notes on Gravity, for two reasons. Firstly, because it feels like it all gets a bit serious now; just at the point where you’re pretending time doesn’t exist, things happen to remind you how real it is. Close friends and family die or get seriously ill, kids leave home, and parents, rockers of that first cradle, are no longer around. Crevices appear in relationships and skin. Solid partnerships around you disintegrate and lives are rearranged like meteors blasting apart well-ordered and familiar constellations. Kronos time, that linear clock that marks out our journeys around the sun, gets louder and louder, ticking you into panic as you anxiously await the chiming of the hour.
It’s time, but not as we know it.
Secondly, my blog’s new title references the fact that gravity is what I’m interested in raging against now; that pull towards the ground, the sirenic, magnetic force that whispers, ‘Look how easy it would be to head downwards’,like my boobs and the corners of my mouth.Well, balls to all that.I managed to get a metaphorical Uber driver to take me to my metaphorical abandoned parking lot in Caracas, and I’ve started to recruit an army of outcasts and pirates to help me pick the locks and dig out the box I have locked away. It has pieces of me, and possibly you, in it too.I’m wondering about what might happen if I place Kronos time in that box instead, and retrieve the power of words. I am wondering what might happen if I, if we all, begin to measure the days in Kairos time, marking our lives in moments where great things might happen. In that crackling, dazzling pause between the inhale and the exhale, where fates can change, and anything is possible, you will find me searching. I am wondering what it might be like to begin again, from this place of suspension between two halves of one life.
