Many years ago, I discovered that the ancient Greeks viewed time differently from most of us today. They had two gods of time, Chronos and Kairos.
Chronos measured time in days or hours; Kairos didn’t measure time as a quantity but as a quality. Remember the short holiday, a weekend you spent in a strange place or country, and how, when you got back, you thought you’d been away for a fortnight? Time seemed to have expanded because of the new experiences you were having.
Compare that with how long it seems to the weekend if you have a boring, pointless job!
I then realised that modern industrial man is left-brain dominated. Everything which is important is measurable. If it can’t be measured, it is insignificant. So we have developed amazing technical intellectual abilities, looking at the measurement of everything, but neglected the vital importance of everything else, which is not measurable but is based on quality, which is very much the domain of the right-hand brain.
When we consider happiness, honesty, anger, compassion, love, hate, sorrow, and ambition, all these qualities of sensation and feeling are the very essence of our lives, yet they are usually left unaccounted for as we advance technologically.
This frenzied technological advancement has dehumanised mankind and led to much anxiety, depression and unhappiness. We are now seeing the impact this is having on our children’s health and wellbeing, and we have to find ways to re-engage more with our right-sided brain.
Valuing the intangibles and downplaying the tangibles, the “perfect man” could be described as having a perfect balance between the right and left sides of the brain, so that, when necessary, he can be analytical and very methodical while maintaining a sense of wholeness.
The extreme examples are now for us all to see with Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire having power way beyond any human being’s wisdom and capability of knowing how to use such power for the benefit of mankind, and at the other end of the scale we see the billions of people suffering starvation and untold suffering due to war, famine and disease who don’t have the power to change their lives for the better – victims of our modern left-sided brain world!
How balanced are your brain hemispheres?
Michael Lingard BSc (Econ) D.O.
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Michael Lingard, a regular contributor to Wellbeing Magazine for the past 18 years. A passionate promoter of real health care and would like to see a paradigm shift in modern medicine; from a disease & pathology based system to a health and ethology based system.
