It accumulates without asking, moves without pause, and insists on progress even when meaning lags behind. Most of what we call productivity, urgency, or momentum is simply a learned response to this pressure - a way of coping with the discomfort of being aware that time is passing and cannot be negotiated with.
And we are taught to outrun it.
From an early age, speed is framed as virtue. Faster is better. More is safer.
Movement becomes proof of worth.
Stillness, by contrast, is treated with suspicion - something indulgent at best, unproductive at worst.
To pause too long is to fall behind.
To linger is to risk irrelevance.
Ambiguity becomes inconvenient.
Silence feels unfinished.
Time is treated as a resource to be captured rather than a state to be honored.
But there is another response: to stay.
Art, at its best, has never been about productivity.
In one way or another it has been about absorption.
In those moments, time doesn’t disappear, but it does loosen its grip.
The body softens.
Thought slows.
Presence becomes possible again.
This is the function of the work.
Not spectacle.
Not performance.
But a counterweight.
A counterweight instead about what steadies the mind.
To what absorbs attention without exhausting it.
To what allows a person to inhabit their own life more fully, even briefly.