There is an old god, older than the Olympians, older than most things we can name. His name is Chronos, and he devours his children.

But this myth, like most, is not meant to be read literally. It is meant to be chewed. It is gristle, not a boneless aphorism. Chronos is not merely the ticking of a clock or the succession of seconds. Chronos is linear time, the deep, dragging river we are all thrown into at birth, carried along with its current whether we’re ready or not.

Chronos is not cruel. He is inevitable. He is the long slow fermentation of wine. He is bone marrow thickening with age. He is how trees remember wind patterns in their rings. He is not your to-do list or the sharp angles of an iPhone clock. Chronos is not capitalist time. He is the time that keeps growing your hair while you’re grieving. He is the time that brings rot, yes, but also blossom.

I often think about Carlo Rovelli, the physicist who dares to tell us that time may not even exist in the way we experience it. That what we perceive as a forward march is more like a kaleidoscope, shifting relationships, overlapping processes. Rovelli reminds us that time is an emergent property, not a universal metronome. And yet, we are biological creatures who feel it. Who age. Who grieve in sequence. Who bury our dead and plant flowers on their graves. Even if time is an illusion, it’s one we live inside, like lungs live inside breath.
So, why time? Why this sequence, this birth-life-death rhythm that can feel both merciful and monstrous?

Because time is what allows things to ripen. It allows stories to unfold. Love to ferment. Healing to occur not all at once, but in stuttering steps, backslides, and unexpected blooms. Chronos is not just the devourer—he is the compost pile where old selves go to break down, become fertile, become part of the soil of our becoming.

The Greeks also gave us another word for time: Kairos, sacred time, opportune time, the time outside of clocks. But Kairos can only be recognized by creatures who know Chronos. We need the mundane to see the miraculous. We need hours and days and years to know when now is different.

When now is thick with eternity.

Chronos is the great leveler. He takes everyone. But perhaps he gives something, too: contour. We know something is precious because it ends. Because it happened and will not happen again in quite the same way. He is the one who teaches us that love, real love, is not about forever, it’s about showing up again and again in time, in grief, in celebration, in the ordinary.