there’s a lot of “kairos” at the beach

This post is my “wrap-up” from the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I’ve gone back through the week to share new images that didn’t necessarily fit the previous stories.

I’m a writer first, but this kind of vacation tends to communicate best via photographs. There’s a deep tranquility built into the place where the ocean meets the land, and I believe it’s because the shore is such a perfect metaphor for the juxtaposition of the physical and the spiritual, the meeting place of mortality and immortality, the idea of time washing against eternity.

Time certainly does move differently at the beach. I’ve always understood that time is a more complex, harder to define concept than the seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years we impose to try to account for it.

Our measurements are calibrated in relation to the rotation of the earth on its axis, and its progress through space in relation to our sun. At the same time, this solar system is hurtling through deep space as part of a galaxy, which in turn moves in relation to other galaxies, and as part of a complex dance of expansion we are only now beginning to understand.

At the beach all of that drops away, and what we understand as chronos time is essentially irrelevant. I like that. In fact, the more advanced in chronos I become (remember I turned 60 just a month ago) the less the passage of time seems relevant to my experience of life.

I guess that’s fortunate, seeing as I have a lot less chronos – quantitatively – in my future than before. So instead I am enjoying it qualitatively, and that turns out to be more of a spiritual – or kairos – reality. There’s lots of kairos at the beach.