How do we navigate creative time?
Notes on time and timelessness
I’m landing home after a late summer trip to Argyll in Scotland: a visit to stay with old friends in their new home on a hill farm. It was an abundant four days. We picked ripe plums and blackberries and walked in ancient woodland. We unpacked a lot of boxes (and a lot of books). We talked, and talked, and talked.
I had that feeling—do you get it too?—of time having somehow expanded. I asked myself how it was four days when it felt like weeks. Home, when I returned, felt different. Surely I hadn’t been away for just days?
This feeling comes, in part, from suspension of usual routines (like working and sitting at a desk). But it was a reminder that time is a flexible entity, something that stretches and contracts. The richness of connection over those few days—with my friends, with the landscape, with myself—meant that I fell into a way of being that expanded beyond the limits of hours and days. Time seemed to thicken.
I remembered that the ancient Greeks had two words for time: kronos (or chronos) and kairos.
Chronos is associated with structure: with clocks and calendars. Chronos is how we measure time in a quantitative way; it has developed with the growth of industrialisation and technology.
In the days before mechanisation, time was more specifically located within a smaller geographical area; it was marked by the rituals, events and daily rhythms with which the whole community was familiar. Over the centuries, as the world has become standardised and mechanised, chronos developed as a way to synchronise with those outside our immediate communities.
Kairos is an experience of time that is more qualitative than quantitative. It has been described as ‘numinous’; more personal and subjective than measurable. It has a cyclical, rather than a linear, quality. Possessing a kind of boundlessness, kairos brings with it the possibility of spontaneity and surprise.
All of this is pertinent to how we think about creativity.
There are times, perhaps, when we’re so deeply immersed in creating that we experience what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention) defines as ‘flow state’: ‘an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness.’
When we’re deep in flow, our sense of time becomes distorted, as though we step out of chronos and into kairos. As Csikszentmihalyi states: ‘in flow we forget time, and hours may pass in what seem like a few minutes…In other words, clock time no longer marks equal lengths of experienced time; our sense of how much time passes depends on what we are doing.’
In contemporary studies of creativity, Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of the flow state has become a given. Yet, though it can be helpful in identifying what is at the heart of creative practice—focused attention, deep presence, connection to self—arguably, if we’re not careful, it can become a stick with which to beat ourselves. There’s a potential risk that this kairos-type flow becomes something we feel we need to achieve, to strive for. If we ‘fail’ to enter flow state, are we truly creative? Can we really call ourselves artists at all?
The fact is that while creative practice can be a portal to this state of consciousness—allowing for the boundless spontaneity and surprise of creative impulse—without the bounded-ness of systems, our work risks being formless.
There is another, more workaday mode to creativity, one more rooted in chronos, which is important if we’re to execute the work and finish what we’ve begun. When writing, for example, I might be engaged in planning or drafting, research or revision, proof-reading or indexing—activities that don’t (for me) induce flow but that, nevertheless, are vital to the completion of what I’m writing.
Without structure and systems, what we create might be chaotic—and for this we need to harness the linearity of chronos. Without linearity, the reader (or spectator, or listener) gets lost. Without a deadline—a self-imposed container of time in which to work—we might never finish the piece at all.
But for me, the question remains: how can we ‘be’ time, rather than try to ‘conquer’ it as something to overcome? (a notion that is explored in more depth by Oliver Burkeman in his wonderful book, Four Thousand Weeks).
More precisely, how can we navigate between the energies of chronos and kairos in service of what we want to create? And how do we develop the capacity to discern when is the right time to activate each state of being?