From my corner of the world, I watch humans treating time as replaceable. Spendthrifts, they apply life without the responsibility of those who know their finitude. As if there were a moment when, coming from heaven with poise and light, a representative of the infinite (for me always Morgan Freeman in an elegant white suit) could bring a package extending life’s time.

Fundamental aspects are left behind, out in the open air of oblivion, and there they stay, waiting. And that happens in the name of what?

In the name of what are fundamental public policies relegated and swapped for endless, heated debates centered on the narcissistic vanity of the speakers?

In the name of what is the development of people and teams solemnly ignored by terrified managers who, in pursuit of results, go blind to the intelligence of having well-prepared teams?

In the name of what do fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers forget their children and grandchildren and leave them orphans of different thoughts, essences and actions? In the name of what do children and grandchildren put off the warm meeting with parents and grandparents, postponed again and again? In the name of what are loves postponed and people forgotten, dead in life? In the name of what do people mistreat people, from haste, from the urge to arrive first, to conquer what exactly?

The list is endless, the question is always the same: on what altar do I burn my time?

The wise Greeks tell us that past, present and future are not three dimensions of time. Only the present fills time. The past and the future are two dimensions relative to the present of time.

Even if, now and then, we are entangled by the past or anguished by the future, only the present is actually available. Each time these two relative dimensions abduct us, life’s time is burned (in the name of what?).

For the ancient Greeks, Chronos takes care of mathematical time, measured, counted. Relentless, cruel, it marches on, indifferent to who made use of the precious portions of life available. Chronos is the time of the vivid, real present, consistent with bodies and things. We can observe it in levels and degrees, but it is always limited to the present, the only time that actually exists. Chronos’s single focus is the present, in seconds, fractions of a second, nanoseconds; each of its parts contains the whole of the present. Of the now. Of living that cannot be postponed.

To cross this impregnable barrier, we use language that, by rescuing the past and dreaming the future, transmutes into the possible door for us to go beyond objective reality. Language can take us to the marvelous timeless or imprison us in the traps of the already lived and the not yet lived.

To the relief of this devourer of time, the Greeks introduce Kairos, who alerts us to the quality of time, to the possibility of extracting from each second its potential for life and of attributing meaning to moments, harvesting from the banal its notability. Kairos stretches Chronos’s time. Focused on living with quality of presence (the kairological challenge), we can make quantity yield more. And a deep dialogue with a friend can have brushstrokes of the eternal.

What Chronos massifies, Kairos distinguishes. Kairos brings to routine timeless points of such beauty that they cancel the deafening tick-tock of the clock.

The Greeks also teach us about Aion time, the time of meaning, which joins past, present and future with its ineffable stitching, with a consistency that lets us, human as we are, come into contact with the divine.

Psychiatrist Eric Berne, an attentive observer of human behavior, noticed that, to fight boredom, people made an unthinking distribution of time (often allied with Chronos’s despotic command). In the sedation promoted by automatism, people go on without knowing the “what for, after all?” of life.

They flee from the dangerous Kairos contained in contact with themselves and with others: they ritualize encounters, isolate themselves, keep the superficiality of pastimes or, worse, poison encounters with endless disputes. There are also those who work, work, work, staying impermeable to feeling.

Kairos and Eric Berne (look at that, what a duo!) join to announce the possibility of stretching time in genuine encounters guided by qualified presence.

My personal challenge is not to leave for later the life that presents itself today. It is to extract from each second the possible Kairos. Pragmatically, I drag my attention to the here and now, in luminous moments or not. For me, the much-vaunted quality of life is anything but quality. It is quantity. It is time. It is Chronos.