Today's joy work will focus on protection,
Specifically on protecting your time.
Imagine you are a mine.
It's not hard to do.
There are gold and silver and diamonds and salt and coal in you.
But going within can be dangerous.
We fear the dark.
We are afraid of small spaces and suffocation.
We are terrified the whole thing can collapse.
Not to mention the potential in mining for environmental disaster.
No more.
In a joy work economy,
We ourselves must do the work of mining.
And we do this by beginning with ourselves,
Our own emotions.
We dig down into the dirt to recover what has been buried and bring it up to light.
We do this through regulation.
Regulation can mean laws enacted to ensure the safety of workers and the protection of the environment.
But we can't only rely upon others to create such regulation.
We must do it ourselves.
Regulation also has another meaning.
In mining,
There is a regulator that manages the flow of air so that oxygen levels stay steady and toxins get dispersed.
So in addition to creating our own regulations,
We must also control our own regulator.
No one can do this for you.
We may turn to others for support or advice or guidance.
But in the end,
We ourselves must be the one to do it.
There are tools and techniques that can be helpful.
And as we do our joy work,
I'll share some with you.
But you are the one who will decide which to use and how and when.
The when is very important.
And our relationship to time is at the heart of joy work.
So today as we reflect on time,
We'll begin to learn to regulate our emotions for safe and effective mining.
Time as we know by now is not always linear.
Time can be a line,
Like when you're waiting in line to get Harry Potter tickets,
And you're excited and impatient to get to the front.
Time can also be a spiral,
Like when the same issues come up during a certain season for you,
Or when a big life event happens,
Like a birth or death,
And suddenly you're back where you were the last time you experienced something like this.
Time can be a cycle,
The seasons of your own internal sprouting,
Budding,
Flowering,
Growing,
Shedding,
And letting go into seed once more.
And there's also sacred time.
In ancient Greece,
There were two words for time,
Kronos and kairos.
Kronos is passing time,
Chronological time,
Clock and calendar time.
We count it,
We measure it,
It is finite.
We can save it or spend it.
We can lose it.
We can make it up,
Like when you're on that airplane that left super late,
Suddenly the pilot comes on to say that she made up the time,
And you will be arriving early.
While kronos is chronological time,
Kairos is sacred time,
Eternal,
And also a moment.
It is qualitative,
Not quantitative,
And it's essential for writers and other creators.
It is the supreme moment of alignment and creation.
Ancient Greeks used it to refer to archery and weaving and rhetoric.
And while I love a good arrow and have discovered knitting to be a form of meditation,
It is the rhetorical importance of kairos that is most important to me today.
Aristotle said that kairos concerns the knowledge of time,
Not time itself,
But knowing what kind of speech or writing is appropriate for the time in order to be effective.
So kairos is both timelessness and timeliness.
It means dipping into the eternal now,
What Augustine called caves of my memory,
And also maintaining awareness of the present environment and circumstances surrounding where you are.
As you practice your joy work in kairos time,
These concepts will become more familiar to you.
Let's do some journaling now to explore this.
Go ahead and get your journal.
We will write simply for one minute in response to each of these questions.
The first question is,
When do you feel rushed?
It's not easy.
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And finish the phrase that you're writing now and then we'll answer the next question which is when do you feel relaxed?
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Finish the phrase you're writing now and then answer this question.
What memory do you have about an experience in your life that you consider to have happened during a sacred time?
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Very good.
Finish the phrase you're writing now and the next question is what internal states were you experiencing during this time?
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Very good.
And the next question.
When you think about writing,
How does the understanding of time factor in?
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Very good.
Finish the phrase you're writing now and then ask yourself when you sit down to write,
What feelings do you have about time?
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Good.
And finish the phrase you're writing now.
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What and when was your best writing period?
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Very good.
Two more questions.
How were the elements,
Circumstances,
And internal states during one of your best writing periods similar to your experience of a sacred time in your life?
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Very good.
Go ahead and finish the phrase you're writing now.
And here's our last question.
How can you use these insights in your own life and writing now?
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Very good.
Finish the phrase that you're writing and then go ahead and put your journal away as we've talked about.
It's very important to let the creative process happen and then take a break.
Step away from it rather than moving back into editing or critical mode with your writing.
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