I have been thinking a lot about failure and how it’s an opportunity.
This was inspired by a close family member who was fired recently. It’s been traumatic for him, and we’ve been trying to figure out how to support him. But he’s having to go through the stages of grief and dealing with it, and that’s hard to watch a loved one do.
It’s tough for men to lose a job. It substantially raises the risk of them committing suicide. It’s not uncommon for men to hide the loss of a job from their families due to the deep shame of not being able to provide for themselves.
Our work identity is bound up with our sense of worth in general. To be fired can rock your core, making you wonder if you can recover from what can seem like a personal rejection.
But maybe that’s when a paradigm shift is in order. And time to let “kairos” take over.
What is kairos? In Greek, it’s a word for chance. But, more specifically, it translates to the correct time and place. The idea comes out of the practice of Greek archery when you find the most opportune moment to hit your target.
In Ancient Greece, there were two types of time, Chronos and Kairos. Chronos is the one we are familiar with in modern life—chronological time. A sequential series of events. We mark it by days or hours using clocks and calendars. In contrast, kairos is a season or moment, like harvest time, in which timing is everything but not necessarily predictable or measurable.
We all have the experience of kairos, where everything falls into place, or an unexpected opportunity arises. It’s often seen when one door closes, a window opens. But, when you are married to Chronos, the idea that things are supposed to happen a certain way at a particular time, our hubris can make us ignore signs of kairos that might propel us in a different direction.
So, the best I can do with my disappointed loved one is to encourage him to see this as an opening for kairos. We rarely expect to be fired; it’s an experience in which your predicted trajectory is interrupted. But maybe that interruption opens room for the good fortune you would never experience otherwise.
But, before you enter this non-Chronos time, it’s hard to imagine those possible opportunities. And the unknown is scary. It takes bravery to embrace kairos.
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