Navigating Time & Giftedness

The dance between Chronos and Kairos.

Photo by Malvestida on Unsplash

For the gifted mind, time can feel both wondrous and burdensome. Immersion in an idea collapses the ordinary clock – hours vanish, meals are forgotten, the sun sets unnoticed. Yet in other moments, the same intensity turns inward, creating an almost unbearable awareness of life’s brevity, of how many paths remain unexplored, how much meaning might pass untapped. It’s a dance between kairos and chronos: between the sacred moment of inspiration and the ticking demands of the everyday.

A gifted person often lives across multiple timelines – the inner world of reflection, the outer world of tasks, the future world of potential, and the ancestral world of memory and pattern. They feel the friction between them. Their imagination outruns the clock, while their sensitivity registers the subtlest shifts in emotional weather. Time becomes less a resource to manage and more an ecology to inhabit – one that breathes, loops, and evolves.

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I tried to escape the yoke of time, daydreaming in the classroom, imagining a plethora of worlds unrelated to schoolwork.

During long car trips from Seacliff to Seaton where my grandparents lived, I stared out the window and slipped into trance-like meditations, oblivious to the physical plane.

My golden tickets were reading books, writing, art-making, swimming or playing sport – hours passed in minutes.

My bedside clock ticked through the night and, in the morning, its kind, open face was the first I saw. I didn’t much care for its blaring alarm bell but wound the mainspring daily to keep it going. It was more a pet than a time keeper.

My first general anaesthetic and the black, gaping hole of nothingness which I fell into and abruptly returned from, was an immersion in time’s underbelly.

Confined during illness to a bed and four walls, where the light cast Sanskrit messages, time was suspended. Hibernation was a relief as well as a release.

Piano practice was strictly half an hour after school. Time plodded. The hard, wooden bench made my bum ache. If my mother sat beside me, she’d knit – her clever hands synchronising with the metallic beat of the metronome. When dinner had to be prepared, she left the living room to clammer among the pots and pans in the kitchen. If I tried to finish practice early my mother said, “Five more minutes to go.” Even while cooking, her eagle eye never strayed from the clock.

My mother was wedded to chronos. It was always time for something or other. The clock dictated the day.

Routines were sacrosanct: dinner at six o’clock sharp, breakfast at eight. Lunch was more flexible on weekends and the wait for Sunday Roast felt interminable.

Punctuality was paramount. I was never late for school and, after school, my mother waited in the car to pick me up. I didn’t miss netball or tennis games or Sunday church or piano lessons or drama classes. For my mother, it was a source of pride that we were never late.

Lo be tide anyone who complained about going somewhere. Obedience was non-negotiable. Selfishness a sin.

Often arriving early to events or appointments, we’d sit in the car watching the minutes tick by on the VW’s dashboard clock. While I simmered in a puddle of resentment, my mother applied lipstick and rehearsed her smile in the sun visor’s tiny mirror.

Most mornings my mother glanced at the kitchen clock with its ominous black numbers and sighed. “The morning’s already vanished. Where did it go?”

No-one in the family had an answer. Time kept slipping into the future, as a popular song by the Steve Miller Band, Fly Like An Eagle, noted. Time slipped through my mother’s fingers (cliché resisted). I slipped through time’s cracks without leaving a trace as to where I’d gone. This, my secret hideout, was how I resuscitated my soul.

I didn’t regret the passing of time; it seemed more a blessing than a curse. I was keen for the future which was brighter than the past and better than the present. I wanted to stretch forward to that far horizon where time wasn’t such a drag. I was impatient for adulthood, autonomy, actualisation.

My mother said, “Don’t wish your life away.”

I kinda did wish my life away. It was a symptom of a deep dilemma: how to value my life when much of it didn’t matter.

When a retiring school principal entered my Grade Six classroom and declared, “Seize the day!” I wondered if time was something to keep rather than to lose. I still recall that pale, balding little man waving his arm as his hand made a fist. Perhaps he thought his gesture futile, but it was seared in my brain like a firebrand.

Even then, I sensed that time behaved differently for me than it did for others. It wasn’t a straight line stretching neatly from past to future, it was more like a spiral or a web, with moments folding into one another. One thought could trigger a cascade of associations, linking present sensations to half-remembered childhood images or imagined futures that felt as real as memory.

Time was porous, fluid, recursive.

I could never quite stay inside the “now” that teachers and meditation guides insisted upon, because the now was always rippling with echoes and anticipations.

When I was younger, I wondered if my mother’s devotion to time was an act of control. Now I see it as a form of grounding, a way of tethering herself to the tangible, to the rhythm of the world’s turning. Perhaps she needed the clock to hold her steady, while I needed to lose myself in timelessness to feel alive. Both were strategies for managing the mysterious current that carried us through existence.

As I grew older, I began to notice that certain experiences of time couldn’t be measured at all. The way a single conversation can transform a life. The way grief stretches a minute into an eternity. The way creative flow dissolves the hours until all that’s left is the hum of presence. These aren’t linear events – they’re entangled fields of meaning.

Sometimes I envy those who seem content to live by the clock, moving from task to task with calm linearity. But then I remember the way one insight arrives carrying traces of a dozen lifetimes, the way art and intuition weave threads between what has been and what might be. We aren’t bound by sequence – creativity, healing, and meaning-making often emerge in nonlinear spirals.

Perhaps that’s what it means to “seize the day” – to enter time fully, aware of all its layers. To live as both my mother and I did, each in our own way: she attending to the hands of the clock, I attending to the spaces in between.

And somewhere in that meeting, time itself became a companion, guiding me as I danced with the multidimensionality of a gifted life.

I still get annoyed when someone says it’s time for something or other (unless it’s food or drink). I love the luxury of having free days, weeks, months to work and play and creatively live life on my own terms. When an event or appointment looms large on the calendar, my whole being rebels against the inevitability of chronos. I arrive early, park the car and watch the minutes tick by on the dashboard clock. During those moments, the maternal and eternal intertwine, never to be undone.