wisdom of the ages.

This month I turned 34 years old. I marked it by doing absolutely nothing unusual. I kind of wished it wasn’t here so quickly. I’m no longer in my early 30s, and I barely remember those years. They have been spent in Surreal Time.

Philosophers, time management systems, self-help authors, and religious have postulated that there are two types of time: Kronos time and Kairos time.

Kronos time gets spent marking the seconds, the minutes, the hours, the days. In Kronos, we set appointments, check our clocks, measure time by half-pasts and quarter-’tils. We pay our bills in Kronos; we take taxis in Kronos; and in this Western world, Kronos probably stresses us out more than befriends us.

Kairos time is time “in the moment,” where we forget about Kronos, where we sink ourselves deep into the muck of meaningful activity. It’s the kind of time that, we realize once we get back to Kronos, flies when we have fun. It’s the kind of time that doesn’t exist when we are there. It’s a beautiful place.

All well and good, but I’d like to add a new time marker to the mix — the Surreal.

Surreal time, similar to Kairos time, becomes apparent to us when it bumps squarely into Kronos. If you’ve experienced the death of a loved one, for example, you’ve probably experienced Surreal time.

It’s that feeling that something very grave, very serious has occurred, yet people are flitting around the world unaware — texting something insignificant (in comparison to your experience) on their phones, buying sweaters at over-priced stores, bickering with each other about which orange looks more ripe.

When you’re in Surreal time, you feel like banging on the plexi-glass of Kronos, and telling everyone to wake the fuck up. “So-and-so just died!”…or…”My boyfriend and I just broke up!”…or…”The doctors just said it’s terminal! Can’t you see the world has changed forever!”

That feeling. That’s Surreal time.

Welcome to my home of these few years past. I feel so separated from the Kronos world. I bump into it with a thud several times throughout the days, and just wish Kronos would stop sticking it to me, would stop throwing itself in my face.

You found those cute pair of shoes for little Petunia yesterday morning? Well, during that same Kronos, I spent it in my son’s psychiatrist’s office yet again coming to terms that a residential placement may be in his future.

Or — this was just yesterday — my mother calls me on the phone to remind me that the City might shut-off water in our neighborhood in the afternoon. This is so Kronos, and also an important piece of information to have at hand.

But, in my head — in my Surreal time — I’m coming to grips with the fact that E-Niner is now taking four hefty psychotropic medications and I’m wondering how we got here. A little water shortage is nothing in comparison to what we’re facing.

In the course of events, I’ve met a few people who are living with me here in Surreal time, and they are such a comfort. We can experience the world together in public — looking Kronos squarely in its constantly aging face — and laugh at the irony of it: I’ll take a glass of red and a side of schizophrenia.

What sucks about Surreal time is that when you snap out of it, instead of thinking that “time flies,” you wonder where the hell it all went. You want the Kronos back that you’ve spent in the Surreal state of weeping and gnashing of the teeth. It doesn’t make you feel any younger.

Surreal time does, however, make you wiser. And this, my friends, is what sucks about wisdom: it comes at a price, and that price is Kronos and Kairos.

Once you’ve tasted Surreal, you spend your Kronos worrying less about the measuring. You spend your time in Kairos experiencing more deeply its elixir, trying to slap some Kronos on it to make the moments last longer.

Once you’ve spent a long time in Surreal, you come to the physical and emotional understanding that both Kronos and Kairos are fleeting. And then, bam!, you’re in your mid-30s with high cholesterol since you’ve been in Surreal time living off fast food drive-thrus as you flit from therapy to therapy across the city.

Time flies.

Experiencing the fleet in Surreal isn’t the way to do it.