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6 min read 26

UofWinds 440, Week 26, 2026: Chronos vs Kairos, Umyazu, An Existential Guide to: Asking for Help


Good morning. I am sitting at my desk in the study. When I arranged my coffee mug and all my secondary screens around my laptop (my phone, an ipad playing BBC Sounds, a TRML e-ink display currently displaying writing advice that begins, "Find a subject you care about"...), I neglected to clear a landing spot for my cat to leap upon. My poor Tonks leapt before she looked, found there was no room to move into, and fell backwards to the ground, taking with her a stack of books that mercifully did not land on her. I have comforted my cat and have re-cleared my desk, properly this time.

My children are sleeping and my husband is at the soccer fields, volunteering his time so that kids can play the beautiful game. I can't say that I've watched many full matches of soccer this World Cup, but now that we are moving into the knock-out rounds, I will be lending much more attention to the matches. I have been a fan of World Cup soccer for some time but I admit in those early years, I mostly enjoyed the game as an ambient experience, watching the screen more with soft fascination as time would bend in the summer heat. But now that I'm in a house-hold with air conditioning and that is fluent in soccer, the game is more legible, atomic, and tactical. I watch while playful arguments of who are the top five best centre-midfielders are passed between my son and husband. I am on Team Make the Ball Happy.

Chronos vs Kairos: Understanding how the Ancient Greeks viewed time will make your life richer


I re-found this essay from McKinley Valentine by chance, but the timing is perfect. It is the beginning of summer and my mind is currently fixated on making sure that myself and my family find ways to experience summer moments despite the fact that everyone will be working on different schedules. I plan our family vacations this way but not the rest of my time. I've sadly had summers that have passed by without feeling like I have experienced it.

This essay — Chronos vs Kairos: Understanding how the Ancient Greeks viewed time will make your life richer — isn't really about that. It is about something deeper.

In the first Greek translations of the Bible, each use of the word ‘time’ in the above passage is rendered as kairos, not Chronos.
In 1985, a group of black South African theologians wrote a response to recent crackdowns by the Apartheid government. It was called The Kairos Document, and it began “The time has come. The moment of truth has arrived.” The Document was pervaded with a strong sense that the time was ripe for change: the fate of South Africa balanced on a knife’s edge, and small actions might have the power to change the path of history.
But kairos need not be as dramatic as that. It can be a small moment in one person’s life that is ripe, and full, and perfect.

Umyazu


I have set my mind to one particular goal for the summer: I want to start reading many more books. I have a to-read pile of books that is only growing and has already proven to be a hazard to living beings in my home. For their safety, I should read more.

This essay from Mandy Brown also suggests why reading might be good for me and perhaps you as well. It begins,

Reading is the art of attention. What a mess we’ve made of that word. From the earnest effort of a mind reaching for the world to a mindless, exasperated skittering through the slop. The attention economy is misnamed. Our attention is not being harvested but rather suppressed, flattened out, demeaned into submission. We do not attend anything when we doomscroll or binge watch or tap tap tap one notification after another; we abandon—ourselves, our bodies, our kith and kin.

Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. We read to come alive to ourselves, not to forget who we are or what we are doing, or what is being done to us without our consent. We read to encounter the world, to connect what we know to what we do not know yet, knowing all the while that such understanding is always temporary, lovely precisely because it is transient. The suspension of disbelief that a reader brings to a text is an openness to becoming someone new, to shedding old selves and wriggling into new ones. It is an invitation to change.

An Existential Guide to: Asking for Help


I try to follow Kurt Vonnegut's writing advice: say what you mean to say as simply as possible. And yet, there is a part of me that aspires to write wild, bombastic prose that assaults its subject with outlandish attack, largely because I love to read essays written this way.

An Existential Guide to Asking for Help begins with this steady climb up a roller-coaster:

You would think that asking for help is the simplest thing in the world. Babies do it instinctively, pink fists curled against the cosmos, wailing for milk; college freshmen do it reflexively, forwarding their PDFs of syllabus readings to chatgpt at four in the morning. But somewhere between the cradle and the Slack channel, the whole business got royally rotten. You’re supposed to be an autonomous unit now, a free-standing monument to the liberal imagination, that is smooth, utterly frictionless, shinny, hemmed in by password managers and two-factor authentication. Admitting that something out there might dent this, your immaculate enclosure, feels obscene, like flashing in a library. A request for help is an unlicensed leak of inwardness. It stains your pristine floor.

There are a couple of other pieces that I've read during the last couple of weeks that rhyme with this kind of writing. What binds them together is that they give a language to one's inner world that is wild and unhinged and has no other outlet. Heather Havrilesky writes this way. She's not afraid to SHOUT her inner shame.

From this bewildering mire, I want to offer this gentle suggestion:

Attuning yourself to social cues, particularly when you’ve worked hard to block them out or discount them for years, can be extremely empowering. Because, even though you might believe that most people just HATE YOUR PERSONALITY (you have proof!), the truth might be much simpler than that. A lot of people might love you but dislike the way you move through social situations. Many people might dearly want to signal to you to just TONE IT DOWN A TINY BIT or LISTEN MORE CLOSELY or BE MORE RECIPROCAL but they don’t feel they can because your defenses are always up. You make it clear that you don’t want to know.

You might not know this precisely because you really don’t want to know this! Your shame is too big to try this idea on for size!

But the Heavyweight Champion of the rambunctious Id that refuses to self-censor when confronted with the absurdity of the world is Patricia Lockwood. From her diary of A Tradcath Wedding, which is gloriously profane.

He pronounced the word ‘nuptial’ as noopt-see-all. If that’s correct, never tell me. Dishearteningly, but perhaps inevitably, he began to speak of the Great Replacement Theory. ‘There are places where the marriage and birth rates are so low that even the secular media, of all people, are beginning to talk about it.’ The clear takeaway was that I should sneak out to the bathroom and become impregnated without further delay; only then could he be at ease. ‘When people ask me what they can do to help the world’ – I cannot imagine anyone ever asking him this – ‘I tell them get married, have a family and DON’T BE CRAZY!’ At the altar sat a veiled twenty-year-old girl who had met her beloved on Snapchat using the hashtag #bigfamily. She had never known any other kind of language, kind of life. She had hoped to have a mechanical bull at the reception, but none had manifested.

I am not quite sure this over-the-top writing is universally loved or closer to a preference to a particularly strong flavour. This is why I stuck this recommendation at the end, even through it was the passage that I wrote first.

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