A question from the back seat — “why don’t trees grow up to the moon?” — a fact about heartbeats, and the only kind of time that counts. By G. Ryan Ansin
“Why don’t trees grow up to the moon?”
My child asked me this from the back seat, somewhere between an errand and a nap, in the flat voice kids use for their largest questions. I almost answered on autopilot — something about gravity, or sunlight, or because that’s just how it is, buddy. The clock said we were late.
Then I caught myself, because I’ve learned that a question like that isn’t a question. It’s a portal.
I’ll keep this short — I have no interest in spending your time. Read it, close it, and go get eye-level with the small person who asks you impossible things from the back seat.
Here’s a frame that changed how I father. The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is clock time — sequential, countable, the minutes we “spend” and “run out of.” It’s the tyranny that nearly made me brush off my kid. Kairos is the other kind: the opportune moment that will resonate outwardly, the ripe opening, the door. It has no length. You can’t budget it but once you know the difference, you can chase it. It simply arrives — from the back seat, at tub-time, on the chairlift, in the ninety seconds before goodnight — and asks whether you’re awake.
And here’s a settling notion. Nearly every mammal, from the shrew to the elephant, is issued roughly the same allotment of heartbeats in a life — on the order of 800 million to a billion. The mouse spends them fast and is gone in two years; the elephant spends them slowly across seventy. We humans are the strange exception, stretching ours to two or three billion. You don’t get to choose how many beats you’re given. You only get to choose which ones you’re awake for.
So the real question isn’t how many. It’s: how do we make the defined amount worthy?
Tim Urban drew this unforgettably in an essay called The Tail End: stop measuring your life in years, and start measuring it in visits. By the time he left for college, he’d already used up something like 93% of the in-person days he would ever get with his parents — the rest of a lifetime with them is a thin tail of maybe ten days a year. How darn lucky are those with young kids? We aren’t in the tail yet. And what we do now can determine if the statistics are true in our lives. We’re in the fat, crowded front of the graph of life density, right now. This is the 93%. We’re spending it today.
You cannot add heartbeats to your life. But you can convert the time you already have. Chronos is fixed — chasing more of it is a rigged game. Kairos is everywhere, and nearly free. One minute of true attention can rescue an hour of missed presence, zapped into scrolling your phone, because it lands on the moment that was ripe. It is the whole difference between a father who was technically around for eight hours and one his kids felt for eight seconds — and will carry for eighty years.
Which brings us back to the trees.
A tree doesn’t grow to the moon because it was never meant to. It grows exactly as tall as its roots, its soil, and the quiet web of other trees and fungi beneath it can hold and support relationally. Its limit isn’t a failure. Its limit is its belonging. It reaches up only as far as it is held and can hold others.
That’s roughly the answer I finally gave. And it’s the truest thing I know about a life, too. What matters was never the height — the count, the hours, the beats. It’s the web. The being-held and the holding. Kairos is just the name for the moments we notice we’re part of it.
Somewhere in the next few hours, another impossible question is coming your way. Your clock will tell you that you don’t have time.
Your clock is measuring the wrong thing.
Be awake for sixty seconds. That’s the whole practice. When I’m old, I won’t count the hours I logged. I’ll want to say four words and mean them:
I was there.
(As posted on Medium.com at https://medium.com/@gryanansin/chronos-vs-kairos-the-two-kinds-of-time-we-have-with-our-kids-7d6b901d2c01)
