Kairos is a Greek word which is often used to mean “the destined time.” The eleventh chapter of Rollo May’s “The Cry for Myth” is an elegant exegesis of the Briar Rose fairy tale, which offers one of our culture’s more beautiful illustrations of kairos. When the hundred years of Briar Rose’s slumber had just passed, a prince approached unafraid and found that the thorn-hedge imprisoning the castle had become a mass of large and beautiful flowers. The following is Rollo May’s commentary at this point:

This is a beautiful dénouement: the thorns become roses and the hedge
becomes flowers by virtue of “creative waiting.” The fairy tale would
have it that this occurs simply by waiting. I believe differently; it is inner
growth, the external manifestation of kairos.

This mythic approach to time is opposite to the routine—and often boring—
concept of time as automatic passage of “tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorrow” creeping “in petty pace from day to day.” This demonstrates
that this great change did not occur because of the special qualities of this
prince (others were as courageous and died in the thorns). This prince, we
assume, sensed the kairos, the moment when “all creation trembled and
groaned.”

May sees the tale as revealing that this prince approached with the “courage of relationship” and a sense of the kairos rather than the “wishing without mutuality” that doomed the other suitors to a miserable death among the thorns. The kairos can be neither fought nor denied.