Volume 7 · The Long Afternoon · Essay 249
So-So Automation
You may not know the name So-So Automation, but you know the thing. This page only introduces the two of you formally.
Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.
What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.
Consider the railway porter who has carried ten thousand suitcases. He knows what nobody packs: a plan for what happens after arrival.
In the end, life asks only whether we were awake while it happened. And when you forget it — you will — the world will remind you. It is a faithful tutor.