A Brief Pause

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 3 minutes, or less.

A SHORT STORY

I spent the past week working with my company, Theater Mitu, on our latest piece, The Ones.

It’s a performance installation that rethinks the future of god. In the work, we propose an idea: AI is not an attempt to mirror humanity, but rather the most recent chapter in humanity’s ongoing obsession with inventing god.

What I discovered this week is that all this conversation about AI is really an obsession with time.

We’re all afraid of time and of its inevitable end.

For me, part of the reason I create art is to manifest what Robert Frost calls “a momentary stay against confusion,” a brief pause that can bring comfort to my anxiety.

As I walked down the street this past week, my mind kept drifting to the future or the past, caught in an urge to hurry through it all.

As I walked, I kept returning to a line from the poet Jane Hirshfield:

“I don’t know what time is. You can’t ever find it, but you can lose it.”

I don’t know why, but that line brought me comfort.

Perhaps you and I can live inside that paradox together this week,
and take a little time to consider it.

A POEM

“蝸牛 そろそろ登れ 富士の山” by Kobayashi Issa

Oh snail,

climb Fuji,

slowly, slowly

Grateful,

Michael