Executive Functioning: The Two Clocks on the Wall

On Kairos, Chronos, and the Weather Inside the Mind

Two clocks shape our days—chronos with its measured minutes, kairos with its living weather. This series listens from inside that tug, where “executive function” becomes a question of time, not will.

Opening — Two Clocks on the Wall

The idea for this series arrived the way many of my pieces do—sideways, with its coat still damp. After the essays on gestalt processing went out into the world, the comments kept circling one particular ache. People recognised themselves in the description of meaning arriving whole, of thought refusing to march in tidy steps. Yet again and again the conversation turned to a familiar accusation: executive function deficits. As though the problem were a faulty manager in the skull rather than the shape of the calendar we are asked to live inside.

I write from the middle of that weather. I am a gestalt processor who spends her professional days inside buildings ruled by bells—classrooms where learning is sliced into sixty-minute rectangles, meetings that begin by announcing how little time we are allowed to become human together. I know the tug in the ribs when chronos knocks on the door with a clipboard, and the quieter tug when kairos sits on the windowsill swinging its feet, waiting for the right light. Most days I move between them like a tenant with two landlords.

The language of executive function has never sounded like a description to me; it sounds like architecture. It imagines a mind organised as an office block with a competent executive allocating tasks to obedient clerks. When that building does not resemble our inner terrain, the conclusion is not that the blueprint is narrow but that the resident is disordered. Yet my own experience—shared by so many who wrote after the GLP series—feels less like poor management and more like living by another clock entirely.

Kairos and chronos are old Greek names, but they live on every corridor wall. Chronos is the ruler of schedules, the belief that minutes are identical coins and that worth can be counted by how many we stack. Kairos is the unruly season, the right-time that cannot be summoned by alarm. Between them lies the territory currently labelled deficit. I want to stand inside that territory and describe it without borrowing the landlord’s vocabulary.

This series will be gentle by intention. I do not wish to build another theory with hard edges and citations like nails. What I hope to offer are atmospheres—short doorways of reflection accompanied by poems that speak the part prose cannot carry. There is no gold-standard measure for the feeling of a moment ripening, only recognition when someone names it. Jung once imagined a quantum psyche where observer and observed shape one another; these pieces will lean toward that imaginal physics rather than the clinic’s ruler.

The opening poem grew out of a sentence I hear almost daily: you have forty-five minutes with me today. I wanted to place that phrase on the table and listen to the room answer back—the waiting room clock with its confident face, the body with its private weather, the two times arguing softly like relatives at a funeral. From there the series will wander through classrooms, kitchens, and meetings, noticing how often what is called dysfunction is simply allegiance to the living clock.

So consider this an invitation rather than a lecture. If you recognise yourself in these pages, you are already part of the argument. We will begin where many of us begin—under the gaze of a clock that believes it owns us—and see whether another measure might be breathing nearby.

The Two Clocks on the Wall

The waiting room keeps a bright obedient face—
round mouth of minutes chewing their small gravel.
Someone has decided this is help:
a chair, a form, a pen chained to a season.

You have forty-five minutes with me today—
as though time were a ration book
and not a river wearing several names.

The clock believes itself a spine.
It counts like a careful landlord
knocking on the pipes of the body:
pay attention, pay attention, pay attention.

But inside, another bell is loosening its hair.
Kairos—soft-footed, difficult guest—
arrives without ID, smelling of rain,
asks for no schedule, only a window.

I have lived my life between them—
one clock with shoes polished for factories,
one clock barefoot in the orchard
testing the fruit with its thumb.

They called the distance between these voices
executive function—
a tidy office where a small tyrant
should be filing the weather into folders.

Yet the weather refuses its paper clips.
Some mornings the body is a tide pool
and the thought will not start
until the moon remembers its name.

Forty-five minutes can be a thimble
or a cathedral with poor heating.
I have watched an hour crawl like a dog
and a decade vanish while the kettle boiled.

Relativity is not only for physicists—
it lives in the jaw that will not open,
in the story that waits by the door
until the right shoes arrive.

They say begin at the first step
as if meaning were a staircase.
But my mind begins like bread—
warm in the middle, crust arriving later.

The worksheet sits like a small fence.
The bell rings its iron opinion.
Somewhere the real work is circling
like a gull above the car park.

Chronos wants proof of movement—
ticks, boxes, signatures of obedience.
Kairos wants a chair by the window
and the courtesy of listening.

Between them I learned disguises:
how to wear minutes like a uniform,
how to pretend the storm was punctual,
how to apologise to a clock.

Still the body keeps its private calendar—
season of salt, season of holding,
season when the word finally turns its key
and the page fills faster than breath.

If this is a deficit
it is the deficit of a language
that mistakes roots for laziness
and ripening for delay.

Look—
the clock on the wall is certain of its power,
yet even it depends on a trembling quartz
to remember what a second means.

And I, more trembling than quartz,
carry two times in one coat—
the one that can be measured,
the one that can only be met.

Tonight the orchard clock is speaking—
peaches thudding into their own hands,
a dog dreaming its sideways dream,
the moon signing a slow permission.

Forty-five minutes?
I will give you something better—
a moment that opens like a mouth
and does not ask what it costs.

Let the factory bell keep its teeth.
I am learning another grammar—
where beginning is a door,
and the door arrives when it arrives.