Opportunity to Change

In one of my articles from class, I read this passage that I was surprised to identify with to such a degree. The article is about things they've learned from studying infants that he thinks should be applied to psychotherapy, so I did not expect to read anything about my life in it. But lo and behold, here it is:

"We experience our life as being directly lived in the here and now. The now, a present moment, has a duration. It has its own temporal unfolding. The ancient Greeks had another word for that: kairos. Kairos is the moment of opportunity. It is a moment of coming into being. It is the moment when all of a sudden, things come together, unpredictably, and we have a small window in which we can act. And if we act in that window, we can change our destiny. If we don’t act in that window, our destiny changes anyway precisely because we didn’t act.

What I propose is that most moments of our lives when we are awake are essentially moments of Kairos. The consequences of any given present moment can be very great and can change our life course, or the consequences can be very small because they only determine what we are going to say or do next, or what the mother is going to say next, or what the baby is going to do next. But these present moments determine the future in a way that cannot be predicted until it happens" (p.180).

I think I'm starting to recognize those moments.

Stern, D. (2008). The clinical relevance of infancy: A progress report. Infant Mental Health Journal, 29, 177-188.