Radio Silence

Until just a few years ago, maritime radio stations were required to observe radio silence on certain frequencies for the three minutes between 15 and 18 minutes past the top of each hour, and for the three minutes between 45 and 48 minutes past the top of the hour. These periods of radio silence were imposed to allow opportunity for the possibility of weak distress signals to make it through the din of usual radio traffic. More colloquially, we often use the term radio silence to describe the situation when someone who is usually very chatty stops communicating altogether.

The sundial on the south wall of
Ely Cathedral with the Greek inscription
"Know the Time" 

I’m not sure but you may have wondered why there was an abrupt halt to my regular sabbatical blog posts. Since my last post, much has transpired. There was much to do and many decisions to make. After my time in Cambridge and my pilgrimage to Canterbury, I made my way to London to spend a final few days in the United Kingdom. You heard me correctly – a final few days.

After two months, resources began to run low. While inflation may have begun to ebb slightly in the US, it is a very different matter in the UK. When plans and budgets were set months ago, I could have anticipated a very different outcome. I could have squeezed several more days into the budget but there was more to consider. Without going into a lot of details, it proved necessary for me to adjust my plans and return to the US two weeks ahead of schedule. As I write this entry, I am recovering from a more intense case of jet lag than I had experienced in the past – but recovering, nonetheless.

All that is to say, that in that silence, I had to take time to reflect. I concluded that it was time – time to return home – not because the clock had expired but that “the time was right.” Ancient peoples understood this in ways we moderns often miss. This is the notion of time the ancient Greeks called kairos.

Kairological time is the time of events rather than intervals. It is the time of ‘right times’, the right times for things to happen. It is the time of the Ely sundial (pictured above), whose message, kairon gnothi, often translated as ‘know the time’, is more accurately rendered as "choose the opportune moment." Though our sense of this kind of time has weakened considerably in our modern world, we still do sometimes respond to it. For example, if we feel a hunger coming we might say, “It’s time for lunch.” That’s a statement of kairological time. By contrast if we declare, as we more commonly do, “It is one o’clock, lunchtime!" we are responding to a command dictated by chronological time, when the clock determines our activity. The decision to return home was not one taken of chronology but of “kairology.”

Now that I have returned, it’s time for me to “break radio silence.” So, fear not intrepid reader, my sabbatical is not yet over (chronologically or kairologically!) and there is much to process from the time I spent wandering as a stranger in a strange land. The reflections that will follow will be a bit less “linear” – they will not follow the timeline of my journey – so much as they will be a bit more “3-D” as a deeper dive into the experience and the impact that it had. Stay with me. I am still walking, though on more familiar soil. Even so, the paths may lead to places yet unknown!