Excerpt from "A Sideways Look at Time" by Jay Griffiths

The ancient Greeks had different gods for time's different aspects (including the god of the moment for weeding, the god of the moment of horses panicking, the god of the moment when a party suddenly falls silent). One of the most important was Chronos who gives his name to absolute time, linear, chronological and quantifiable. But the Greeks had another, far more slippery and colorful, god of time, Kairos. Kairos was the god of timing, of opportunity, of chance and mischance, of different aspects of time, the auspicious and the not-so-auspicious. Time qualitative. If you sleep because the clock tells you it's way past your bedtime, that is chronological time: whereas if you sleep because you're tired, that is kairological time. If you eat biscuits when you're hungry, that is kairological: wheareas if you eat by the clock, that is chronological time. (In English there is that quaint-sounding mid-morning meal literally named for the clock: elevenses.) Children, needless to say, live kairologically until winkled out of it. Chronos was considered by the Ancient Greeks, and the modern West, as superior to Kairos. Astrology is time considered kairologically: in Hindu life, for instance, the time of the individual and that of the cosmos are considered inseparable. The traditional zodiacal animals of Korea are also used to name the twelve-hour periods into which the day is divided and impart their characteristics to each period and to those born in that period. While astrologers (and, I'm tempted to say, "Kairopractors" but I won't) see a rainbow of colors in time, the dominant calendar of the West is strictly magnolia.

Kairological time has a different sense of movement compared to chronological time. For a rough comparison, contrast an urban with a rural day. In cities, where time is most chronological, you move into the future, facing forwards, your progress through the day is like an arrow while the day itself "stays still," for time is not given by the day but is man-made, culturally given, and defined by the working-day or rush-hours. In a rural place, days roll over the horizon at you, round and gold as the sun, time moves towards you and is nature-given, defined by sun or stars or rainstorms. In this more kairological time, the future comes towards you (l'avenir, in French, expresses that, or "Christmas is coming") and recedes behind you while you may well stay still, standing in the present-the only place which is ever really anyone's to stand in. This experience of time, so unlike the urban, is one reason why the countryside, and access to it, is so vital in overurbanized societies; it offers a kinder time. 

Kind but fluky. If chronological time is like the worldwide suburbia, kairological time is the genius loci, the spirit of that particular moment. Kairological time is far richer-far trickier-a concept; time enlivened and various, time as elastic and fertile as an ovulatory cascade.