Becoming a Kairomancer
An Excerpt from Sidewalk Oracles by Robert Moss
Kairos is jump time, opportunity time, the special moment that you seize or miss. In Kairos moments, you may feel you have been released from linear time or that powers from outside time have irrupted into your world. The Greeks personified Kairos as a young, fleet-footed god, completely bald except for a curling lock falling over his forehead. Hence the phrase “seize time by the forelock.” If you meet this fellow on the road and fail to seize the moment, you’ll find him very hard to catch. Kairos is slippery.
Brutus talks about Kairos time, the time of opportunity, in a famous passage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
Kairos, in Greek, has related meanings in two interesting contexts: archery and weaving. In archery, kairos means an opening, in the specific sense of a long aperture through which the archer must make his arrow pass, as Odysseus, at the start of his battle with the suitors, must fire an arrow through the holes in a dozen ax heads standing in a row, in order to prove himself. Meeting the test of this kind of Kairos requires fine precision and the force to drive the arrow all the way through. In the art of weaving, kairos is the moment when the weaver must draw the yarn through the gap that opens — just for that moment — in the warp of the fabric that is being woven.
http://kajama.com/becoming-a-kairomancer/
Brutus talks about Kairos time, the time of opportunity, in a famous passage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
Kairos, in Greek, has related meanings in two interesting contexts: archery and weaving. In archery, kairos means an opening, in the specific sense of a long aperture through which the archer must make his arrow pass, as Odysseus, at the start of his battle with the suitors, must fire an arrow through the holes in a dozen ax heads standing in a row, in order to prove himself. Meeting the test of this kind of Kairos requires fine precision and the force to drive the arrow all the way through. In the art of weaving, kairos is the moment when the weaver must draw the yarn through the gap that opens — just for that moment — in the warp of the fabric that is being woven.
http://kajama.com/becoming-a-kairomancer/