Mindful Mondays #22: Spring and Time

Slowing down, experiencing time, seasons, water, life, and books

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash

Good morning, and welcome to Mindful Mondays.

This weekend I took a much needed break from work and the internet and spent some time with my daughter in San Francisco and Marin County. It was a lot of travel, by plane, train, automobile, and even ferry boat. But somewhere amidst all that motion, there were moments I was able to stop in a way that rarely happens in the course of my everyday routine.

One of these was on the ferry from Larkspur to San Francisco. It was a beautiful, sunny spring day. Standing on the deck of the ferry boat, cold wind whipping my hair and face, I looked out over the Bay and the green headlands of Marin and just appreciated this improbable moment of being alive on Earth.

At a bookshop in Larkspur, I had just picked up Jenny Odell’s new book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. In the introduction, she calls on the ancient Greek distinction between chronos, the linear march of what we would understand as “clock time,” and kairos, the subjective moment that can be “seized” and experienced. My moment on the deck of the ferry felt like an experience of kairos.

Later that day, my daughter and I ended up lying on the grass at Golden Gate Park, watching a drum circle made up of seemingly every kind of person and percussion instrument in the Bay Area. After a relatively cold, wet winter in California, it was the first day that truly felt like spring to me. I thought about the seasons as a time scale that is not man-made, but which we intuitively understand because we evolved to live within it. Sensing the changes in temperature and weather, noticing new flowers springing up: What a contrast from the daily drag of measuring out time in Google Calendar.

There was another time scale at play in this moment, too: sitting and watching this drum circle with my daughter, who had just turned 17, brought back a memory of watching the same drum circle on my first visit to Golden Gate Park, also at age 17, with my own father. He and I were on a road trip, visiting colleges up and down the length of California before my senior year of high school. Soon, I’ll be taking my daughter on a similar trip—and the wheel turns around again.

As we cross the invisible line of the spring equinox—or, in corporate speak, “close out Q1 of 2023”—consider taking a moment to shift out of chronos and experience kairos. Even if just for a day, allow yourself to feel life on a more organic time scale. Slowing down and taking the long view can give you a new perspective on your daily work.

Article of Interest

A Pilgrimage for Book People: This one’s for the bibliophiles among you: my friend Charlie Becker reflects on growing up in a family of second-hand booksellers and their annual pilgrimage to the Brandeis alumni book fair in Chicago.

Podcast of the Week

How to Optimize Your Water Quality & Intake for Health: In this episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast, the good doctor considers how much water you should drink (apparently, a lot more than I currently do), whether your tap water is safe (probably not, honestly), alkaline vs. regular water, structured water, and everything else you wanted to know (or possibly didn’t) about the substance that makes up about 70% of our bodies and the Earth’s surface.

Quote of the Week

“The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.” —Hannah Arendt

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That’s all for this week. As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mindful Mondays. What was your favorite thing I shared this week? What would you like to read more about? Let me know by replying to this email, commenting on Substack, or hitting me up on Twitter.

Thanks for reading,

Chris Cordry, LMFT

PS: Want to change your relationship to time? Mindfulness can help. If you’re interested in building more mindfulness into your day and making time for the things that are most important to you, just reply to this email and ask me about 1:1 coaching.

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