Some of you may have read my ramblings about purposive drift that you can access through the sidebar. A few more of you may have read my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”, published on Changethis. But there is still a lot more I need to explore.
I touched on one aspect of this in something I posted in February, “Cultivating Kairos”. Kairos is a Greek word for “the right time” or “the appropriate time” – a qualitative sense of time as opposed to the more mechanical, relentless clock time, Kronos.
I discovered another Greek word Metis – “cunning intelligence”, the quality displayed by Ulysses – the other day. And again, like my discovery of Kairos, I have a strong sense that this concept is also going to be important in developing the ideas around purposive drift.
Curious, isn’t that that the ideas people were using a couple of thousand years ago seem so relevant to the world we face today.
(As a totally irrelevant, but perhaps amusing aside, I happen to be writing this with my favourite word-processor Ulysses.)
One thought on “The Greeks had a word or two for it”
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Was listening to a radio piece the other day from CBC on how the classics. The author was talking about how the division in the west between spiritual inquiry and science began with Plato and Aristotle, with PLato of course putting much stock in the internal and the ideal and Aristotle preoccupied with the external and obervable and manifest.
Many of the words that you would naturally be drawn to are words that Plato would have used as well. And so Kairos, Chaos, Phenomena, etc. You might have a field day with Plato, the Oxford English Dictionary and your inquiry.
For what it’s worth, I happen to think that the English words that come from Greek are the ones I am most at home with, followed by the Latin and the Germanic ones. So for example, I am less and less interested in calling myself a facilitator. My Danish friends who started the KaosPilots business school are more to my liking!