A Message for the Future

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

My Mom would have turned 72 yesterday.

Sometimes the thing I miss the most is her voice, or the way she would leave me a message at the end of my day.

A few years ago, I became obsessed with messages when working on Utopian Hotline with Theater Mitu.

During the process, we interviewed an astrophysicist, Simon Steel, and he said something that always stuck with me.

When we asked him what message he would like to send to the future, he said:

“In a sense what you want to do is to try and capture a moment. And that moment, whatever that is— would capture these things that may not be physically beautiful, such as standing in Monet’s garden or listening to Beethoven's music, but capture the essence of what you think is beautiful.”

When I heard that, it reminded me of something I instinctually did in the last year of my Mom’s life, which was record her voice. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe like he said, these recordings were messages I wanted to send off to the future so I could discover them, and give myself or somebody in the future an idea of what I found beautiful about the time that I was living.

What message would you like to send to the future? What moment would you capture today? And who would your message be for?

A CREATIVE TOOL

I recently downloaded Bing, an AI search engine, and was amazed at the immediacy of the results. This will revolutionize how we search the internet.

One of the unique things you can do is actively curate and summarize your news. For instance, I gave it the following prompt and was amazed at the accuracy:

“I want you to find the top 5 stories covering Artificial Intelligence in the past 24 hours. Only include links from reputable resources & rank results based on popularity"

A PIECE OF ART

“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye

originally published in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Grateful,

Michael