One day, while scrolling somewhat mindlessly online, I stumble over someone’s reposting of one of Virginia Woolf’s (abridged) diary entries from Wednesday, October 15, 1931, which says:
“I will cut adrift – I will sit on pavements and drink coffee – I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim – this fine October.”
And that image of sitting to dream tugs at something half-asleep in my soul.
For there is the memory of sitting at cafes in this and other countries, sipping on some drink or the other while within my heart dreams sing in harmony. For there is the memory of all the ways my mind likes to swim. There are all the Octobers I can remember.
A series of golden and red-turned leaves drifting, fluttering, dancing to the ground. A rejoicing for cooler mornings. The promise of winter.
It’s the word “dream” that reminds me of something else I saw (also when mindlessly scrolling). It was a video reel showing a man (presumably Dr. Kamal Sabran himself) making and recording sounds in a library-study-like room with music equipment, shelves, books, desks. These sounds, the click of a typewriter’s keys against the blip of pulsating bass next to a synthesizer’s stereo drumbeat, come one after the other as the following words play across the screen:
“Do not try to be more productive than a machine.
Be more unpredictable than one.
Slow down. Sleep in. Be late. Dream sideways.
Every moment you refuse to hustle for the algorithm, you reclaim your right to be a human being—not a human doing.
Your value is not in output.
It’s in awe.
It’s in the fact that you still look at the sky and say: “Wow.”
We do not need to compete with AI.
We need to reclaim the terrain of the soul.
Let the machines optimize. Let them calculate, simulate, replicate.
Our power is not in precision.
It’s in presence.
Not in speed, but in stillness.
Not in perfection, but in the poetic glitch of being alive.
The sparking words, more than the sounds, send me off to write a response of my own about slipping sideways out of the tumble of the cogs and doing as I dream.
It’s too easy to forget “the poetic glitch of being alive” and how to “cut adrift” in the sea-thrashing of becoming – becoming a better version of myself, becoming relevant, becoming authentic, becoming seen, becoming both the Jack of All Trades and the Master of Everything, becoming so good I can’t be ignored, becoming and becoming.
There’s nothing wrong with becoming.
But to breathe in time with the humming frequencies of the planets and the stars, to sway to the sweet rhythm of wind-rocked trees, to feel the tingle of blood in my fingertips is to remember.
And, oh, how good it is, like a full night’s sleep, to remember, to be beckoned soulward again, to be reminded of the gift of consciousness, creativity, wonder, and what it is to be alive.
