I was three seconds away from missing the best moment of my week.

My three-year-old came to my desk with a guitar last week.

She'd found it somewhere in the house, figured out how to hold it, and walked over to show me. "Mummy, mummy, watch."

I said, "wait a second sweety, mummy is working."

She didn't leave. She just took a few steps back and kept playing. Quietly. On her own. Still in my eyeline, still hoping.

And then I looked up.

She didn't know I was watching. Her face was completely lit up. Not performing for me anymore. Just lost in the thing itself. Three years old, a guitar nearly her size, in her own world.

I stopped typing. I didn't pick my phone up. I just watched her.

Two minutes. Maybe three. Nobody would have noticed those minutes were gone. My inbox didn't miss them. My calendar didn't register them. Nothing I was building stopped because I looked up from my screen for three minutes on a Tuesday afternoon.

But I almost missed it. I was three seconds away from missing it entirely.

That's the thing about kairos. It doesn't announce itself. It doesn't schedule itself into your calendar. It just arrives. And then it's gone.

The ancient Greeks had two completely different words for time.

Chronos. And Kairos.

Chronos is the time you know. Clock time. The calendar. The schedule. The 47 things on your to-do list. Chronos is measurable, manageable, and relentless. It moves in one direction, and it doesn't wait for you.

Kairos is something else entirely. It's the right moment. The unrepeatable one. The moment that carries more weight than its length suggests. It can't be planned. It can't be manufactured. It just appears, briefly, inside the chronos of an ordinary Tuesday. And if you're not paying attention, you are already past it.

High-achieving women are the most dangerous kind of chronos addicts. Because we're good at it. We're good at managing time, filling time, and optimising time. We build systems for it. We feel guilty when we're not using it well. Our entire identity gets quietly built around what we do with our chronos.

And in all that managing and filling and optimising, kairos just walks up to your desk with a guitar. And waits.

Here's what nobody tells you. You will not remember most of your chronos. The emails. The tasks. The meetings. The things you were doing when your daughter came to find you. In ten years, you will not remember a single thing that was so urgent it couldn't wait three minutes.

But you will remember her face. If you looked up. You will remember it for the rest of your life.

That's the difference between chronos and kairos. One fills your days. The other fills your life.

And you cannot manage your way to kairos. You can only be present enough to notice it when it shows up at your desk.

Just one thing this week.

Pick one moment every day where you put the phone face down, close the laptop, and do nothing except be in the room where your life is actually happening. Not a scheduled mindfulness practice. Not a productivity technique. Just one moment where you choose kairos over chronos.

It won't feel productive. That's the point.

You're not behind. You're just looking at the wrong clock.

Reply and tell me your kairos moment this week. I'll tell you mine.

A few weeks ago, I shared a short book about my weight loss and health journey, and the identity shift that made it possible.

Not the routines or the rules, but the internal changes that had to happen for me to stop cycling and start moving forward. I’m mentioning it here for anyone new, or anyone who wants to understand the deeper work behind sustainable change.

I’ve been writing these pieces in the quiet, between school runs, work, and late-night thinking, but I’ve started sharing more of the journey in real time too. The reflections, the systems, the messier parts of reinvention that never make it into the newsletter.

If you want to follow along, you’ll find me here:

LinkedIn
Instagram
Website: orgesameli.com

Come say hi. It’s less about followers, more about finding the others who are doing the invisible work too.

If something in this email made you pause, think, or feel seen, send it to a friend who’s been quietly trying to make a change, too.
You never know what might land at the right moment. Link here.