When the day seems hardened
by mechanical work, deadlines
and tough choices…
When you’re forced
to give your all to the present
with no time to revisit old memories…
When pauses leave you
feeling guilty and you fail
to see in them a gift of reconnection…
When your day is made more efficient
with the shortest route suggestions on Uber
and AI thinking, reading, and summarizing for you…
Remember a song.
Remember its lyrics and revel in its melody
Forget deadlines and efficiency. Live.
When you build a home
Is that all you build?
Or, in building it
Do you also build perseverance
And discipline, and character?
Do you finally find your faith
That thing that religion
Tried to unsuccessfully teach you
Through indoctrination…
Books and institutions that deliver knowledge
Are designed to bring forth the past to the present.
So that you may build your future
On the foundations of wisdom.
However, building a home
Teaches you lessons in real time.
You learn to create rhythms instead of systems.
You learn that love is presence
And that presence is work.
When I talk of building a home
Know that I also mean
That whatever you build is a home.
In building it, you come to fully live.
In it, you encounter your fears
In it, you realize your strength
In it, you understand
That identity is what you may gather
But your self is what you will find.
When limits are not respected
Knowledge becomes corrupted.
When falsities are not questioned
Beliefs become corrupted.
When intention is not reviewed
Action becomes corrupted.
When words become weapons
Understanding becomes corrupted.
When love becomes selective
Emotions become corrupted.
When the vulnerable are not protected
Power becomes corrupted.
If one
Gets only half a rupee worth
For every rupee spent
What is being lost
Is a real value in favour of a notional one.
You wonder why
You’re dispensable even where you contribute
Or why your voice gets drowned in echoes
Or why change- once life altering
Has been reduced to the prostitution of trend.
You question why
You should bother with setting high personal standards
When public standards have fallen to an all time low.
Or why the qualifications required to build a life
Make cleverness more important than integrity.
You can see
That all of humanity is now subsumed
Within the logic of the economy.
Value has moved from what you possess
To what you’re able to acquire and gain.
We perversely celebrate
The destruction of human values as progress
The notional as the real
The machine as the master
And enslavement as freedom.
We’re each a book of short stories
Events, encounters, tragedies, and joys…
Disappointments and regrets
Passion and pain…
Gathered with us
As the dust of memories.
Why do we carefully collect this dust?
Why do we sustain its presence?
Perhaps we intuitively know
That the answers we seek
Cannot be found in what happened
They’re realized in witnessing what remains.
There was a storm outside my window this morning.
Furious, raging, threatening and violent!
It came with force and blew its fury
It slammed, it banged…my windows wobbled.
The trees are now swaying to their natural rhythm
The storm has passed as quickly as it arrived
The trees survived. The storm couldn’t destroy them.
They’ve seen many storms over many seasons.
Are we creating catastrophe after catastrophe
Because our myths are being challenged
And we must now destroy everything
To create new myths and reclaim our delusional glories?
In designing life around autonomy and conveniences
Have we doomed ourselves to an existence
Where we must now grapple with ghosts
And imaginary challenges to derive a sense of purpose?
When did our spaces become unsafe
For women, children, men…
The helpless, the voiceless, the old and the infirm?
What passions have become more important than compassion?
Have relationships become conveniences?
Forged with a swipe, ended on a whim
Self-serving and devoid of respect
Discontinued because of disinterest?
Have we lost the capacity to build
Something slowly, through time…
Now that we can produce anything
Without engaging with its formation?
When did we reduce
The rich diversity of life
To some meaningless tropes of success
And reserve our applause for a tiresome few?
Have we lost our capacity for knowledge
Through direct perception and deep insight
By relying on our information superhighways
That are misinforming and misleading us?
Are we no longer interrogating life
Because it’s become such an entertaining carnival?
Are we so satisfied with what we have found
That we are no longer seeking?
Where everyone is hustling
Seek nothing from your time.
Don’t try and capitalize it.
You can never profit from your own slavery.
Choose solitude over noisy company;
Invalidation can be a valuable gift.
Let the agitated
Have and live with the last word.
Do the illogical…
And free yourself from the prison of opinions.
Lose purposely.
It’s better than celebrating mindless wins.
Reject the world that is designed to ingratiate itself to you
Seek honesty. Choose difficulty. Cherish the frictions.
Isn’t there creativity
In creating technologies
That can create anything that humans can?
Isn’t there creativity
In developing a simulation
Of human intelligence?
Have the expectations from human creativity
Now reached heights
That cannot be humanly scaled?
Is this the last we are seeing
Of human agency and creativity
At and for human scale?
Can we now find the creativity
To articulate a definition of creativity
That is free of pride and desire and ambition?
Can we return to a way of seeing
That is free of filters and grotesque forms
That hype up beauty, wealth, knowledge and power?
Can we stop creating the Gods
That we couldn’t find?
Can we become seekers of truth again?
Can we reclaim the necessary-
Our leisure, our slowness, our honesty;
And walk away from our creations of the unnecessary?
Can we pause the accolades and celebrations
And ask if there is a higher creativity to be found
In no longer creating creativity-sucking simulations?
We are all learning…
Learning what to do
(Or what not to do)
So that we can be
Light, not shadow
Pure creativity, not conclusion
Free, not enslaved
Abundant, not limited
Happy, not despondent
Truthful, not dishonest
Courageous, not fearful
Grateful, not bitter
We are all learning
Because it’s only in learning
That we grow.
Wit. Wisdom. Wonder... 