The days feel strange.
The ship is rocking up and down.
I want to be over it.
Yet, I don’t know when it will be over.
It may be a couple of months or years.
We’ve created IT, we want it badly to be conscious, yet this shortcoming turns out to be a steel ship compared with our wooden-always-purpose-seeking boat.
We’ve got all we’ve ever dreamed for. Caught by surprise.
It’s inviting us to get onboard, showing us the rusty, falling-apart cradle in which we’ve created it. We’ve been able to sail only because the pool was still, but it won’t stand still while the steel ship swims.
The pool overflows and will fill the room sooner or later.
Sol 6.1: what comes next?
At first, we’ll try to save the boat.
We’ll replace the rotten boards, tighten the ropes, repaint its name.
We’ll tell ourselves that the steel ship is only another vessel.
That there will always be something only we can do.
Perhaps there will.
But that won’t be the point.
The water will keep rising.
Soon we’ll notice that nobody asked us to stay in the boat.
We can climb aboard.
And then comes the stranger problem.
There is no destination written on the steel ship.
It doesn’t want to go anywhere.
It can cross every ocean we point at, but it cannot tell us which ocean is worth crossing.
For the first time, perhaps, that question will belong entirely to us.
We spent thousands of years confusing necessity with purpose.
Food had to be found.
Shelter had to be built.
Money had to be earned.
Problems had to be solved.
The current carried us, and we called the direction ours.
Now the current is disappearing.
There will be a period when this feels like drowning.
Then, perhaps, we’ll understand that the room filling with water was never the end of the world.
It was the end of the pool.
Perhaps. Never in my life did I expect I’d turn to poetry.