Relentless

NEWSLETTER 012

Last week I did in hours what would have taken me days. Sometimes weeks. AI tools have changed the pace of creative exploration in a way that still catches me off guard. A practice that crosses more terrain than I once thought one person could hold.

And alongside that, equally, not in opposition — the other time. Time using my hands, a slower, embodied rhythm. Experiments in baking, hand building with ceramics, running trails without GPS, and planning a research trip to Japan — to be inside the rooms and materials and practices that feed the deeper work. The work that feels time.

Agalia Tan points out in her piece for Radar — as our culture of hyper-productivity meets a quiet pull toward slower, softer ways of living, it's our perception of time that might take the biggest hit. What's a good use of time? What's a waste of time? What even is time? The Greeks named the distinction. Chronos: measurable time, the hours accumulating, the output compounding. Kairos: felt time — the moment that can only be experienced, never optimized. We are living in an extraordinary era of chronos. Tools that compress creative cycles, collapse distances between idea and form. But kairos doesn't compress. It asks for presence, for the body in contact with something real. There's a relentlessness on both sides — the pace of what's now possible, and the patience of what won't compress.

The artist Monique Péan writes about holding obsidian on Easter Island for Material Intelligence — volcanic glass shaped by hominins over a million years ago. She describes what happens in the hands: a centering, a connection to deep time.

Working through something real, you come to know things the mind hasn't caught up to yet. Not a counterweight to chronos — the thing that makes chronos worth having.

This is what it feels like to be relentless at this threshold.

What are you keeping both hands on right now?

— Courtney

OF ADJACENT INTRIGUE

Into the Time Horizon — Nevada Museum of Art. A museum that thinks in millennia. 200 artists across every gallery, asking what we owe the future.

Do You Still Look at the Stars — L.M. Sacasas / Inkwell. Useless delight as a discipline. Why beholding has to come before making, using, or knowing.

There Is No Such Thing as Getting Ahead — TIME. Ahead is a place that doesn't exist. Why chasing the future keeps you from arriving.

Artists Aren't Worried About AI — Glenn Adamson / Jing Daily. The studio isn't worried. Why the people closest to material aren't anxious about AI.

A Meditation for Living Presence — Tara Brach. Presence as texture, not tempo. A different quality of attention — inside the pace, not against it.

P.S. Thresholds is a newsletter exploring the values, methods, and culture that shape what endures. I'm glad you're here.