Some days are promising, others portentous. Facing challenges, it’s hard to know how to respond. (Photo by Jake Weirick on Unsplash)

There are moments when you know that everything is about to change: when you look at a home for the last time in your rearview mirror, for example, or wait for a devastating storm to hit, or stand beside a loved one’s bed as death nears. Compared to those very personal examples, we’re not nearly as much affected by what happens from one day to the next around the world, we figure, until suddenly we are — like on 9/11, or on that day in late 2019 when, apparently, an animal at a market in central China transmitted a potent virus to a human. Then everything changed for everybody.

After those big moments, we remember the days before as seeming so bright — the days when bags weren’t searched and bodies scanned everywhere, or when we could travel freely because America hadn’t yet squandered international goodwill by blundering into Iraq, or when we didn’t worry that a crowd at a concert hall might infect us with an illness that can linger as months of brain fog. In those “before times,” we happily didn’t know what was about to hit us.

Right now feels on many days like one of those times. There are a lot of perils at hand. Every good autumn morning seems like one we ought to celebrate, but with one eye on our news feed, because a smackdown must be coming.

Maybe Vladimir Putin really will use a nuclear weapon; there would be no good response to that. Probably the oil price hike announced this week will lead to both disruptive inflation and then crippling recession worldwide — while in this country, it’s likely to drive up the cost of filling your gas tank or oil furnace, which in turn will lead voters to elect a lot of Republicans next month. And that will be bad for democracy because, according to The Washington Post, a majority of Republican nominees for Congress and key statewide posts endorse Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential race was rigged.

So, yeah, tomorrow looks pretty lousy. In a rather perverse way, that might make us feel better about today — you know, gather ye roses while ye may — but it might also make us feel like just crouching in fear, or at least averting our gaze from what lies ahead.

Of course, everything that happens changes what follows, at least to some degree. We’re all familiar with the so-called butterfly effect — the notion that a disruption as tiny as a butterfly’s flapping wings can set in motion a series of results that will yield something much more profound. If you don’t think that’s true, just pay attention when somebody is rude to you, and watch how you treat the next person you see.

A few remarkable people are able to overcome that sort of negative impact. They are energized by moments such as this, and see the threat of imminent disruption or even disaster as the right time to act. It speaks to something that the philosophers of ancient Greece would call kairos — a word that signifies a moment that is critical, or opportune. A kairos moment is one that exists when circumstances are ripe for change.

What may be our salvation in these tough days is if enough of us see this as a kairos moment that demands action, rather than a time of despair when we slink away.

We all know people who thrive as they contemplate adversity, like an athlete whose skills are elevated by a tough opponent. There’s a biological reason for it: a little almond-shaped bundle of neurons in the brain, known as the amygdala, which reacts to fear by setting in motion a series of physical changes that include sharper eyesight, aroused awareness and a squirt of adrenaline — which, in turn, gives us energy.

That doesn’t happen to everybody, and it doesn’t happen to anybody every time we confront a challenge. That’s why the brain’s response to fear is often labeled the “fight, flight or freeze” syndrome. You freeze when the cerebellum sort of overrules the amygdala, and tells you to stand pat. Evolutionarily, that was useful for animals that were well camouflaged, and it can still help 21st century humans, such as when we need to avoid over-reaction in moments of stress.

But in the face of challenges that current events present to our communities — as we confront anti-democratic charlatans at home and ultra-nationalistic predators abroad — the instinct to freeze isn’t one to trust. We need to act.

The Greeks who gave us the concept of kairos also had a second word for time: chronos, which is the simple notion of sequential time, as one moment and one day after another. We each have a limited quantity of that at our disposal, of course, and we don’t know when it will run out. While that might also be a cause for anxiety, there’s opportunity here: If we can turn chronos into kairos — that is, if we might seize the perilous moment and make it an opportunity for progress and change — then ordinary time can become more powerful.

I’m not a scholar of either theology or philosophy, but I know just enough to recognize that there are more classical definitions of both those Greek words that have drawn academic study. Perhaps I can be forgiven, however, if I offer this notion from the writings of Paul, the architect of early Christianity: “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people…”.  

That opportunity only comes if we have time, in the chronos sense, and there may be little of it left to make a difference before events overtake us. So, yes, these days of uncertainty may well precede a dark event, or a series of them, but it’s also true that in this moment, we may yet influence that imagined or predicted future.

So this is no time to freeze in fear. Political campaigns need our support; conversations about current events need our voices; would-be learners need our teaching. At the same time, it would be a mistake to let despair rob us of the pursuit of beauty and fulfillment in the arts, or in the experiences we pursue that give us joy, or in our relationships with others. We need to take time for all of that.

It is possible, after all, that this is a kairos moment in which the change ahead is one that we can yet influence to be for the good. So there’s no time to waste looking in the rearview mirror or crouching in fear. Not now — not in this clear and vital moment.

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