Kairos

The other morning I had the good fortune to attend the Healthcare Leadership breakfast in Boston which is a fund raising event held each year to benefit the United Way. The featured speaker was Liz Walker. Liz is a media icon here in Boston, and is a respected journalist and a former news anchor. I was surprised to learn that she is an ordained minister as well.

She spoke to us about a number of subjects, but one in particular resonated with me personally. It was the concept of a Kairos moment. Kairos is a Classical Greek word that refers to the opportune time and place to present a thought or thesis for maximum effect. She then recounted her personal “Kairos moment” which ultimately led to her transition to the ministry. As she told the story, I immediately recalled my own such awakening. It occurred while I was a freshman at The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Like many young men and women, I was undecided about my major and altogether naïve about career development. I knew where my skills lay – in math; and I knew where my passions lay – in the visual arts. But I was unsure how the two could be conjoined in a professional career.

Shortly after arriving on campus, I found myself fascinated by the Richards Laboratory Building that I could see from my dorm window. I decided to attend a lecture by Louis Kahn who was its architect, a Professor of Architecture at Penn, and one of the world’s most widely respected designers. He was a soft-spoken, unassuming little man, but what he said that day changed my life. His passion for architecture, and his delight in the expressive power of drawing, filled the auditorium. I can still recall his words as he counseled the incoming architecture students on the need to improve their drawing skills…. “ As a young man I dreamed of spaces full of wonder, that rise and envelop flowingly without beginning or end, of a joint less material white and gold. But when I placed the first line on paper to capture the dream, the dream became less”. I enrolled in a drawing class immediately thereafter, and selected architecture as my major later that year.

Kahn’s lecture was my Kairos moment!