A ZIG ZAG LIFE

                                                                       They are called: matryoshka dolls, but most English-speaking people just refer to them as ‘Russian’ dolls and are a hoot to unpack starting with the large outer doll and continuing until the last wee one is got to. Fascinating that it is only the last one, the smallest one, which is solid. All the others are by necessity hollow so that they may contain each subsequent doll. When I was a boy, clocks were made of moving parts, radios were filled with tubes and boys would be delighted when a clock was worn out or a radio failed because we could unpack same, discover the wonder of the heretofore hidden parts that made the thing work. Of course, any boy’s sister was less than happy should we decide to take apart some doll of theirs to discover what made it go ‘mama’! This need to unpack, to see, to figure out, to understand has remained with me my whole life and is the way I approach problems, the reason

                                                                          1                                                  A Chronos Zig and a Kairos Zag Chronos, Χρόνος a Greek word which the Romans Latinised as Chronus, we know as chronological time, is, at its simplest definition, the flowing of existence from the past, which we record as history/memory, to the present – a somewhat fleeting experience as the moment I typed ‘present’ it was already passing! – to   the future which, of course to use the old cliché that tomorrow never comes, as the moment I am in the future it is the present and the moment I blink, as it were, that future present has become history! Over the millennia, we have moved from experiencing, being aware of, this flow of time from simply checking the movement of the sun, the growth of plants, people, the maturing of the former to ‘harvest time’, of the later through the stages of life into old age and death, to developing every more complex ins