Quality Time

The hour between dog and wolf, or “l’heure entre chien et loup,” if you prefer, is, I think you’ll agree, the dreamiest way to refer to twilight. (I will entertain arguments for “the gloaming” and “the violet hour,” but I don’t suspect litigants will get very far.) It’s that time just after sunset when the atmosphere is still partly illuminated by the sun, when the light is ambiguous and the sky can’t choose between blue and black. Night hasn’t yet fully fallen and we are in the borderland between day and dark. One might be forgiven, in this threshold moment, for mistaking a dog for a wolf, for mistaking safety for danger, for feeling slightly off.

Daylight saving time ends tomorrow. That first Sunday in November is a full day suspended between dog and wolf. We’re still grasping at the corn-silk tendrils of summer just as winter gets more insistent. An undertide of confusion persists: Evening car accidents increase, circadian rhythms reset, the moon’s out before dinner. That space in between is strange and destabilizing until we get used to it.

Each year I assume there’s a wolf hiding in the earlier sunsets, that there’s a certain sorrow implicit when daylight decreases. The dog days are literally and metaphorically over. In the northeast U.S., spring and summer are seasons you can pet. Fall and winter have fangs.

Not everyone feels this. I always consult my friend Leigh at this time of year to try to catch some of her glee. “License to hunker!” she nearly bellowed at me when I reminded her we change the clocks tomorrow. “Sorry, it’s 4:30, I can’t do anything more today. Time to have a drink and watch your shows!” I love her delirium, and I want to borrow some of it to wear like a shawl until spring.

The ancient Greeks experienced time in two ways. Chronos was the clock time that governs our lives, bedtime and estimated departure time, the hour gained or lost. Kairos referred to a more figurative measure of time — the right time, the moment of opportunity, the sacred window for action. In order to recognize kairos, we have to be aware, awake, present. Madeleine L’Engle wrote: “The child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos.”

When I think about the mystical possibilities of kairos, it seems mundane, boring, uncreative to be blue about a lost chronological hour. In any season, there is kairos. These moments of possibility, of serendipity, arrive in all seasons, but we have to be awake to seize them. The stillness of the colder, darker months — that license to hunker — is a time to slow down and observe. What windows of luck and chance and coincidence emerge when we’re a little quieter, a little more observant? I’ll be observing the sun setting an hour earlier tomorrow, wondering about kairos, those moments of opportunity in the offing that the clock and the calendar can’t touch.