02/28/15

Leader Notes: First Impressions Matter

First impressions matter, as they open the door to a greater trust. George Washington knew this and often leveraged his physical appearance to his advantage.

Portrait of George Washington Taking the Salute at Trenton by John Faed (1899)

Astride his spirited hunter Blueskin (not as steady under fire as the celebrated “Old Nelson,” a chestnut powerhouse sixteen hands high that he would later receive from his friend Thomas Nelson of Virginia a few years into the war) George Washington cut a magnificent figure riding with his aides on the road to Trenton in the early morning hours after Christmas Day 1776. Washington had long ago learned how helpful a projected image could be toward achieving one’s goals, and had been attentive to his own image ever since his youthful introduction to the wealthy Tidewater planter society. Towering over six foot two inches tall, with intelligent blue eyes set in a broad face above a proud jaw, his pristine appearance in full dress uniform at the Second Continental Congress had certainly helped to seal his commission, at forty three years of age, as commander of the fledgling American army.

Whatever inner turmoil Washington was feeling that early December morning, his men were awed by the calming silhouette of the stoic commander riding beside them in the dim light thrown by torches being kept at the ready to light the cannons. Beside him rode William Lee, Washington’s personal slave and closest assistant, who dazzled the puritan New Englanders with his exotic turban and riding coat. One Connecticut soldier remembered the scene years later. “The torches of our field pieces stuck in the exhalters sparkled and blazed in the storm all night and about day light a halt was made at which time his Excellency and aids came near to the front on the side of the path where soldiers stood. I heard his Excellency as he was coming on speaking to and encouraging the soldiers. The words he spoke as he passed by where I stood and in my hearing were these: ‘Soldiers, keep by your officers. For God’s sake, keep by your officers!’ Spoke in a deep and solemn voice.” (1)

But the wonderful thing about Washington’s leadership style was his authenticity; he truly possessed rare skills that backed up his image of commander-in-chief. Take, for example, his exceptional horsemanship. He had spent most of his adult life in the saddle, riding daily among the farms of his beloved Mount Vernon plantation. He was considered an exceptional rider even by Virginia horse-class standards, riding in an old-fashioned style. Thomas Jefferson praised him as being “the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful figure that can be seen on horseback.” (2)

But it was while “passing a slanting, slippery bank” that Washington’s great physical strength and horsemanship were on full display. Blueskin lost his footing in the darkness and the great horse’s hind legs began to slide out from under him. Instinctually, Washington rose up in the saddle and “seized his horse’s mane,” shifting his weight and literally pulling the animal back onto its feet. (3) Such skill awed men who lived in an age when everything moved by horsepower alone.

Much of the time, Washington’s sheer physicality was enough to inspire initial loyalty and allowed him to build upon men’s first impressions of him through his honest conduct. Benjamin Rush regarded Washington as having “so much martial dignity in his deportment that you would distinguish him to be a general and a soldier from among ten thousand people.” (4) After seeing Washington’s calm presence in uniform at the Second Continental Congress, John Adams, never one to suffer fools, remembered that “I had but one gentleman in my mind for that important command and that was a gentleman from Virginia…whose skill and experience as an officer, whose independent fortune, great talents and excellent universal character, would command the approbation of all America, and unite the exertions of all the colonies better than any other person in the Union.” (5)

Though it seems a simple thing, Washington’s confident, commanding presence inspired his weary men in a very dark hour even if it was, in reality, his first time acting as a field commander in the war.

(1) William S. Powell, “A Connecticut Soldier Under Washington: Elisha Bostwick’s Memoirs of the First Years of the Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series. 6 (January, 1949), 102.

(2) Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 182.

(3) Ibid.

(4) “Benjamin Rush to Thomas Rushton, 29 October 1775,” in Letters of Benjamin Rush, Vol. 1, ed. L.H. Butterfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 92.

(5) John Adams, as quoted in Harlow Giles Unger, The Unexpected George Washington: His Private Life (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2006), 102.

Additional reading:

http://www.mountvernon.org/research-collections/digital-encyclopedia/article/nelson/

02/19/14

Ike the Loser

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers in England on the evening of June 5, 1944, as they prepare for the D-Day invasion. (Library of Congress)

Not all kairos decisions are made on a small stage.

On June 4, 1944, Dwight D. Eisenhower, as the Supreme Commander of all Allied expeditionary forces preparing to invade German-occupied Normandy during Operation Overlord, brooded in his rain-beaten Army trailer knowing he alone was in charge of the largest invasion in world history. At this moment he commanded over 3 million men—over half of them American. (1)

The surprise invasion, two years in the making, consisted of over 10,000 aircraft, 7,000 sea vessels, a night-time airborne assault of nearly 24,000 troops, and a seemingly infinite amount of supporting resources. (2)

No one felt the pressure more than Eisenhower. A reporter who interviewed “Ike”—a nickname stemming from his boyhood days in Abilene, Kansas—that day observed he was “bowed down with worry…as though each of the four stars on either shoulder weighed a ton.” (3)

Every ashtray in his trailer was “full to overflowing” (4) as Eisenhower bolstered his strength with cigarettes from one of the six packs he smoked a day (5), each paired with a constant stream of black coffee.

The next day, Ike walked around the air fields to visit with the paratroopers as they steeled themselves for the battle ahead.

Wandering alone among them, and helpless to do anything more, he asked their names and joked about their jobs, their favorite sports, their wives and girlfriends.

He queried one private, wanting to know if the man was scared.

“No, sir!” came the emphatic reply.

“Well, I am!” Eisenhower said with a sly grin, soliciting cheers from the men huddled around him. (6)

The notebook draft of the greatest speech Eisenhower would never give.

In his pocket, tucked in the folds of his wallet, was a scrap of paper he would never use—a speech scratched out earlier that afternoon in his modest trailer to deliver to the world in case his decision was the wrong one:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone. (7)

He had underscored the last two words—mine alone.

As a good leader, Ike had planned for every contingency, but, as a great leader, he had quietly prepared to become the biggest loser in history. He would take full responsibility for whatever lay ahead.

Fortunately for him—and for the history of the world—kairos luck would shine on Ike’s leadership qualities the next day, June 6, and the successful D-Day invasion would become a turning point in the war against Hitler.

Eight years later, the American public would like Ike, and his great character trait of responsibility, enough to make him the 34th President of the United States.

(1) Michael Korda, Ike: An American Hero (New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 42.

(2) Ibid, 36.

(3) John C. McManus, The Americans at D-Day: The American Experience at the Normandy Invasion, (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 2004), 116.

(4) Kay Summersby, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight David Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), 188.

(5) Merle Miller, Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987), 603.

(6) McManus, The Americans at D-Day, 130.

(7) Harry C. Butcher diary, June 8, 1944, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas.

02/14/14

Founding Fathers Friday: A Woman’s Touch

Abigail Adams
1766 Portrait by Benjamin Blythe

“If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers, we should have learned women.” Abigail Adams to John Adams, August 14, 1776.

John Adams looked upon his wife as an equal helpmate at every station of his life in an age when such an attitude was not necessarily expected of men.

She deserved it. She was wise, warm, pragmatic and virtuous, advising him in a variety of matters both practical and passionate.

The intimate couple exchanged over 1,100 letters during intermittent separations over the course of forty years.

Abigail’s intellectual prowess often shines through in her letters to her husband, family and friends. These letters are remarkable, especially given the fact that she was never writing for a public audience.

She often quoted maxims by Shakespeare or classical philosophers in between items of gossip in her correspondence, once quoting an observation by the English essayist Sir William Temple on the nature of kairos—“it is an observation of a ‘Statesman that Some periods produce many great Men and few great occasions. On the contrary great occasions and few great Men!’ I believe that great occasions will make great Men, all out of talents which would other ways be dorment”—in a letter to her daughter-in-law. (2)

Her letters reveal her critical influence in the lives of the two great men within her own family. Her husband recognized that he would not have reached the presidency without her, and she wielded similar powers over her son, John Quincy, the sixth president of the United States.

One of the most enduring examples of her influence is found in a letter she wrote to 12-year-old John Quincy while he was accompanying his father on a diplomatic mission to Europe during the American Revolution.

“These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. Would Cicero have shone so distinguished an orator if he had not been roused, kindled, and inflamed by the tyranny of Catiline, Verres, and Mark Anthony? The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lie dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman. War, tyranny, and desolation are the scourges of the Almighty, and ought no doubt to be deprecated. Yet it is your lot, my son, to be an eyewitness of these calamities in your own native land, and, at the same time, to owe your existence among a people who have made a glorious defence of their invaded liberties, and who, aided by a generous and powerful ally, with the blessing of Heaven, will transmit this inheritance to ages yet unborn.” (3)

Abigail Adams displayed an incredible knowledge of history long before she realized her own leading role in the founding history of the United States.

It was from this knowledge that she gleaned the value of character in a kairos moment. She instilled these virtues in her husband and son as only a woman could.

It was she who fanned the embers of their ambition in hard times, reminding them when the going got tough that it is kairos character that makes men—and women—great.

(1) Abigail Adams to John Adams, Weymouth, June 16, 1775.

(2) Abigail Adams to Catherine Johnson, Quincy, August 18, 1810, as quoted in John P. Kaminski, ed., The Quotable Abigail Adams (Massachusetts Historical Society, 2009), 62.

(3) Abigail Adams to John Quincy Adams, 12 January, 1780.

Additional reading: Adams Family Papers, an electronic archive, http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/

02/7/14

Founding Fathers Friday: The Beehive

Chances are good you have his face in your wallet or purse right now, but when did George Washington really become the father of our country?

America as we know it might not exist today if Washington had made a different decision than he did at 3 a.m. on the morning after Christmas, 1776, while sitting on a beehive stuck in a frozen riverbank in New Jersey.

We might then know of Washington as a mere footnote in history, “a little paltry colonel of a militia of bandits,” known only to scholars and enthusiasts as another obscure leader of a failed resistance movement. (1)

Alternative histories aside, a closer look at Washington that morning, when he led a ragged group of desperate men across the Delaware River in an attack on the British at Trenton, reveals a man at the end of a rope.

Things had never looked bleaker for the American patriots. Washington had even admitted as much in a recent letter to his brother John Augustine Washington, writing “I think the game is pretty near up.” (2)

Even the weather seemed to be conspiring against Washington. He sat brooding on the rotting overturned crate that had once been a local farmer’s beehive as a furious winter storm hampered the crossing.

With almost nine miles still between him and Trenton, any attack now would be hours after sunrise. Despairing, he contemplated calling off the attack.

His kairos moment appeared before him here, now, as he sat on the beehive in the middle of the night. He must make a decision.

And so he did.

Above all else, the most prominent characteristic Washington displayed that morning was a complete sense of resolve to see his idea through, even in the face of ever mounting obstacles.

The passing hours had given Washington time to fall back on the iron willpower that constituted so much of his character. He would later tell John Hancock, “I determined to push on at all events.” (3)

One anonymous eyewitness is said to have noted in his diary, “I have never seen Washington so determined as he is now…He stands on the bank of the stream, wrapped in his cloak, superintending the landing of his troops. He is calm and collected, but very determined.” (4)

To Washington, his determination to follow through on the success or failure of the gamble was very personal. Much of what constituted his iron will that night grew out of who he was as a man. He was truly an exceptional man, but what made him extraordinary was his natural ability to do so many ordinary things so very well, and keep doing these things when it counted.

Washington and his aides, who had worked to compile excellent intelligence on the ground in New Jersey, had earlier realized that the British were momentarily weak. America’s fortunate reversal at Trenton came about because Washington was quick to recognize this seemingly small opportunity in those weeks before Christmas 1776.

But Washington alone could make the most out the available opportunity because his great determination and flexibility also made him the strongest survivor (three other attacks across the river failed that night).

The defeat of the British at Trenton paved the way for Washington’s subsequent victory at Princeton and completely reversed America’s fortunes in the Revolutionary War. The twin victories sent shockwaves reverberating throughout the British Empire and awakened a new respect for Washington and the American cause.

That morning—by sheer determination—Washington summoned enough rebel energy to drive a flying shuttle through the loom of the British defenses when the right opening occurred, and by so doing, created one of the greatest kairos moments in American history.

On the beehive see Richard Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973), 252.(1) Edward Tatum, Jr., ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle, (New York: New York Times/Arno Press, 1969), 35.
(2) GW to John Augustine Washington, Dec. 18, 1776, in The Writings of George Washington 6:396.
(3) GW to John Hancock, Dec. 27, 1776, in WGW 6:442.
(4) The authenticity of the often quoted “Diary of an Officer on Washington’s Staff” is the subject of debate among recent scholars. It is often attributed to Lieutenant Colonel John Fitzgerald, one of Washington’s aides de camp, but no original has ever been found. Regardless, in this case, Washington’s resolve is self-evident and the description rings true. See David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press), 422.

02/1/14

Blaze of Glory

Rick Rescorla is a supreme example of a man who consciously embraced his kairos moment when it finally came to him.

An Englishman by birth, Rescorla died a true American hero.

An account of his actions during the Sept.11, 2001, attacks on New York’s Trade Center towers can be found discreetly tucked into the appendix section of the 2008 book We Are Soldiers Still. The book’s author, Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore—a legendary Army commander who led ground troops during the famed Battle of Ia Drang Valley, the opening salvo of the Vietnam War—gives an account of the last few moments in the life of his friend Rescorla, an infantry officer who had served under him in the battle.

First Edition Cover Page

An iconic photograph of a ruggedly posed Rescorla, M16 in hand, snapped in the heat of the 1965 battle, graces the cover of Moore’s other book, the 1992 best-seller We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, later adapted into a Hollywood film starring Mel Gibson.

Despite finding professional success, Rescorla experienced personal tragedy in the few years prior to the September 11 attacks. Divorced and remarried, with two children, he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1994.

As Moore tells it,

He had written and spoken to close friends about his fears of retirement in a year or two and how it appeared that his life would end without the kind of great and meaningful cosmic event summed up in the Greek word kairos. “I have accepted the fact that there will never be a kairos moment for me,” Rescorla wrote in an e-mail to his old battle buddy, battalion surgeon Dr. William Shucart, six days before 9/11. “Just an uneventful Miltonian plow-the-fields discipline…a few more cups of mocha grande at Starbucks, each one losing a little bit more of its flavors.” To another friend Rescorla grumbled, “God, look at us. We should have died performing some great deed—go out in a blaze of glory, not end up with someone spoon-feeding us and changing our nappies.” (1)

A few days later, Rescorla got a shot at his great wish.

At 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists flew a commercial airliner into the top floors of the tower across from his 44^th floor office in Building Two of the World Trade Center, Rescorla sprang into action.

Rescorla grabbed a bullhorn and began evacuating the 2,700 people under his care spread out across 20 floors and a separate office building on the tower complex.

At 9:03 a.m., when terrorists flew a second hijacked airliner into Building Two, Rescorla had already escorted most of Morgan Stanley’s employees out of the building while the rest were escaping down the stairwells.

When the building finally collapsed only thirteen Morgan Stanley employees, the 62-year-old Rescorla among them, were killed alongside the nearly three thousand other victims of the World Trade Center attacks.

Afterwards, no trace of Rescorla’s body was ever found among the smoking debris of the shattered steel skyscrapers. He had left this life just as he had wished to go: “in a blaze of glory.”

The ancient Greeks would have recognized Rescorla’s simple, yet profound, brand of heroism.

The “great and meaningful cosmic event” he had so longed for had been named by them thousands of years earlier.

They had sorted through the actions of their own great heroes, studied the flaming arcs of fate, fame, and fortune, and discovered the one turning wheel that made them all come together.

They had distilled it and named it.

It was kairos.

To them, it was the moment in time where the gods met with mortals.

Even today, as Rescorla’s story shows us, it is still a moment where men and women can open a door to fate and reveal an amazing purpose for their lives—and make history.

(1) Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008), 211.

Recommended additional reading: Stewart, James B. Heart of a Soldier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

01/22/14

Let the Dice Fly High

Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar. Painting by Lionel Royer, 1899.
Caeasar’s successes in Gaul shifted the balance of power he shared with his rival Pompey and prompted his crossing of the Rubicon.

One of the most definitive kairos moments in history unfolded in a cold and dark hour one early January morning in 49 B.C.

Warriors of Rome’s Thirteenth Twin Legion, veterans of the violent Gallic wars that had consumed much of the Roman Republic’s martial energy over the previous decade, stood on the bank of the Rubicon river on the edge of their homeland.

Their loyalty rested on the man who had first led them out of those fields on the opposite side of the river and across the high Alps at their backs. He stood among them, singled out by both the station he had achieved in life and the burden of the decision he was weighing in his mind.

His name was Gaius Julius Caesar, one of two surviving triumvirs of Rome, and he was now the declared enemy of a republic that had dominated much of the Mediterranean world for nearly half of a millennium. His dark eyes peered out from his broad face with the intense stare of a hawk and reflected the flickering light thrown from a nearby torch as he surveyed the unfolding scene. (1)

Caesar’s “thoughts began to work,” wavering as he weighed the consequences of the action of the hour. According to Plutarch Caesar “revolved with himself, and often changed his opinion one way and the other, without speaking a word. This was when his purposes fluctuated most…computing how many calamities his passing that river would bring upon mankind, and what a relation of it would be transmitted to posterity.” (2)

He quietly discussed the situation with a few close advisors. There was little they could say—to the north lay exile and defeat; to the south lay civil war and ruin. Caesar’s next step would be irrevocable, carrying the ripple of drama to the farthest corners of his world.

The lynchpin moment, though great, was short. Caesar had turned fifty years old the previous July, but his decisiveness, energy, and drive were still terrifying traits to behold. Lifting his voice above the din in the darkness behind him, “in a sort of passion,” he abandoned “himself to what might come, and using the proverb frequently in their mouths who enter upon dangerous and bold attempts” Alea iacta est—Let the dice fly high “with these words he took the river.” (3)

Caesar would go on to defeat his enemies as they fled Rome, shaken loose by the speed of his approach and the confidence of the battle-scarred men at his side. He would later crush his rival Pompey in a final battle at Pharsalus in central Greece, despite being outnumbered three to one, and chase Pompey to his death on the far shores of Egypt.

The day would come when he would crown himself dictator of a new Roman empire, launching a new halcyon age for a 500-year-old civilization that would endure 500 years more.

The muddy channel of the Rubicon eventually became lost to history as time eroded the coastal plain it traversed on its fall from the Apennine Mountains running the spine of the Italian peninsula to the west. But the river’s more enduring imprint fossilized into the eponymous symbol of definitive action, the climax in every drama triggering a final denouement away from the familiar.

“Crossing the Rubicon” became the calculated point in a chain of action beyond which one could only press on to a new and different horizon.

What are you prepared to risk when you find yourself standing at your own Rubicon?

Bust of Julius Caesar
Vatican Museum

(1) “Caesar is said to have been tall, fair, and well-built, with a rather broad face and keen, dark-brown eyes.” Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Twelve Caesars, 1:45, as translated by Robert Graves (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957) revised by James B. Rives, 2007.

(2) A. H. Clough, tr., Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1881), 517.

(3) Ibid.

01/6/14

Seize the Day

Fragment of a Kairos bas-relief copy of a 4th century B.C. work by Lysippos, found in a cloister in Trogir, Croatia.

Fragment of a Kairos bas-relief, a copy of a 4th century B.C. work by Lysippus, found in a cloister in Trogir, Croatia.

Life is busy. Are you managing your time well? Are you making a conscious effort to enjoy the moment or maximize every opportunity that comes along?

Ancient Greece was a busy place too.

Lysippus, a prominent Greek artisan in the 4^th century B.C. who at one time served as Alexander the Great’s personal sculptor, created a bronze statue of a kairos image that he likely erected in the public square, or agora, outside his home in the city of Sicyon. The statue depicted a young man with a long lock of hair across his forehead and wings on his feet. This statue was probably similar in appearance to later Roman marble bas-reliefs of a kairos creature that are still in extant.

An inscription by a Greek poet named Poseidippus was carved at the base of this statue to explain the sculptor’s intended allegory to all who passed it:

Who and from where is the sculptor?

—From Sicyon.—

And his name?

—Lysippus.—

And who are you?

—Right Occasion (Kairos), the all-subduer.—

Why do you stand on tip-toe?

—I am always running.—

Why do you have a pair of wings on your feet?

—I fly with the wind.—

Why do you hold a razor in your right hand?

—As a sign to men that I am sharper than any sharp edge.—

And why is your hair over your face?

—For the one who meets me to grasp at, by Zeus.—

And why is the back of your head bald?

—Because none whom I have once raced by on my winged feet will now, though he wishes it, take hold of me from behind. The artist fashioned me in such a shape for your sake, stranger, and he set me up in the portico as a lesson. (1)

Such imagery allows us a peek at the Greeks’ original intent for the meaning of kairos within their own cultural context. Kairos becomes a fleeting moment, one that must be grabbed forcefully as it passes. But it is also a dangerous moment, one with razor-thin margins. It is both dangerous to any who are unprepared to meet it and dangerous to those who may be subdued by them who wield it successfully. Even more danger lies in kairos as the fountainhead of regret—once kairos has passed by, opportunity closes its door forever.

By the time of Lysippus and Poseidippus, creating their works at the end of the great Classical Age of Greece, the concept of kairos had come to possess multiple religious, ethical, and philosophical overtones. Though the linguistic term had originally referred simply to any “decisive crucial place or point, whether spatially, materially, or temporally,” (2) kairos had by then become firmly established in the Greek mindset as an ideal to be pursued, much as the Latin phrase carpe diem would later be used by the Roman poet Horace: “While we speak, envious time will have fled; seize the day (carpe diem), trusting as little as possible in a future day.” (3)

Lysippus’s lesson is still relevant today. It’s your time now. Remember kairos. Carpe diem. Seize your day.

(1) Lucia Prauscello, “Sculpted Meanings, Talking Statues: Some Observations On Posidippus 142.12 A–B,” American Journal of Philology, 127, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 513.

(2) Ralph W. Harris, ed., The New Testament Greek-English Dictionary, Vol. 13, (Springfield, Missouri, 1990), 213.

(3) Horace, Odes IV, 11, 7-8 as translated in Gabriel Adeleye et al., World Dictionary of Foreign Expressions: A Resource for Readers and Writers, (Wauconda, Illinois: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Inc.,1999), 113.

01/1/14

The Kairos Project: This Time, It’s Different

A new year. A new moment arrives fresh, flashes like a jewel, then is gone forever.

Modern English has only one word—time—for the concept of temporal space, but the ancient Greeks divided it into two concepts: chronos and kairos.

Chronos referred to chronological time as modern societies now see it, the constant flow of seconds into minutes into hours. But at certain points along this stream of chronological time there are rare occasions where exceptional circumstances come together like the hinges of a door. These intersections are the right place and the right time for very special events to occur. The Greeks viewed these kairos moments as occurring in Fate’s time, as great cosmic events that could be seized to benefit those who were prepared for them. To them, a kairos moment, given by the gods, changed one’s destiny.

This concept of kairos is at the heart of some of history’s greatest stories. When you begin to see history with a kairosperspective, you see how kairos moments were seized to raise nations, explore foreign lands, and discover new frontiers of science, literature, industry and art. Many individuals who experienced a kairos moment achieved lasting renown as great leaders, pioneers, thinkers or heroes. Many more simply used a kairos moment to make a quiet corner of the world a better place.

Studying these “hinge” moments raises enduring questions. Why do we consider certain people in history great? Great people are no less human than you or me. We all share the same number of hours in a day. What enabled these men and women to each seize their own kairos moment in time? Were they blessed with special skills, or were their actions simply met with incredible luck? Did they see their kairos moments for what they were when they happened, or only after the fact? Are some people simply destined for success and besheret, a Yiddish word meaning it is just a person’s fate to be at the right place at the right time? Or, less laissez faire, does it pay to be proactive, gaining success in the extraordinary kairos moment by good habits formed in the many small everyday moments? Is the ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary the key to producing a positive, great, and memorable life?

Many kairos moments are so incredible they seem almost providential, and certainly seemed that way to the people experiencing them. So, an even more intangible question: do clues exist in the historical record of a supernatural God who freely shapes the course of human events?

On this blog I will explore all of these questions and many more as I take a fascinating look at history using the kairos perspective. How do you see time? I invite you to see it differently and join me on this journey.

Kairos

Portraits at the Hinges of History

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