I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Consciousness is just exhausting sometimes, isn't it?

There's no power-down mode for our minds like there is for the devices we use,

laptops and phones and televisions.

Being a human is sort of like having 24-7 screen time,

but the screen is your own mind,

and there's no real way to turn it off,

none that's worked for me anyway.

On the other hand,

what a gift to be so receptive, to be always thinking, processing, chewing on something, even when we dream.

And what a gift to have poems, like today's poem, as places to do some of this work, a place for the consciousness to live

and to play. How to Write by Anne Waldman. Perhaps I'm kidding myself about the life I lead.

Sometimes I feel I'm dying, like a lot of things I see around me.

Then I turn on the TV and understand that everything must still be moving.

Music, for example, and I rush outside around the corner to a concert.

It's so easy.

Everything accessible from where I happen to live at the moment.

Things like rock concerts, not too many trees on Second Avenue.

Once, on the 6th Avenue bus, I got a sudden sensation I had been alive before, that I was a man at some other time, traveling.

You would think this strange if you were a woman.

If I were a man right now, I'd be getting out of the draft.

But I think I'd want to be a poet, too, which simply means alive, awake, and digging everything.

...