Screenshot Suttas
I should say this plainly at the start.
I didn’t write the poems in this piece.
My AI writing partner, Chat, did.
That matters here, and not as a disclaimer. It is part of the subject. I have been saving screenshots from the Waking Up app for a long time with the vague and noble intention of someday turning them into haiku or other short poems. This was not some tidy workflow where I gathered quotes, fed them to a machine, and waited for poems to fall out the other side. The screenshots came first. Countless screenshots by now. A private archive of lines that stopped me for half a second.
The AI part arrived later.
I had all these little tiles of borrowed clarity sitting in my phone, and eventually I asked Chat to help me do what I had been meaning to do myself. Not to replace the original lines. Not to improve them. Just to answer them. To see what kind of small poem might appear if a sentence from a teacher, philosopher, poet, or psychologist passed through the strange middle space between my attention and a machine’s language.
What came back felt strange in a useful way. The poems were not mine, exactly. The quotes were not mine either. Even the recognition I felt while reading them did not arrive with my name stamped on it. The whole thing became a chain of borrowed voices, and that only made the point clearer. Wisdom is rarely original in the possessive sense. What matters is whether it reaches you at the right angle. What matters is whether it opens anything.
Before anyone gets out the old elementary-school ruler and starts counting on their fingers, a haiku does not have to be strictly 5–7–5 in English. That pattern is common, and for a lot of people it is the first doorway into the form, but it is not the eternal constitution of short poems. English is not Japanese. Syllables are not the same as Japanese sound units. Form is usually more alive than the school-version of form lets on.
I still like the shape of haiku. I like its pressure. I like its refusal to overexplain. I like the way it can hold a thought just long enough for it to become more than a thought. Still, I am not especially interested in pretending the genre police are waiting outside.
Anyway. Back to my museum.
I have a small private archive in my phone. Not family photos, not shopping lists, not screenshots of conversations I should have deleted months ago. Mine is mostly sentences. A line from Henry Shukman. A sentence from Albert Ellis. A fragment from Dōgen, or Alan Watts, or Sam Harris, or Nick Cave. Each one rendered in the Waking Up app’s soft gradients, as if insight itself needs to be gently backlit.
At the bottom of nearly every one there is the same invitation.
Share.
I almost never do.
Not because I am too pure for it. The opposite, probably. I know how quickly a private moment can become a public costume. The second I share a quote, it risks becoming a signal. It starts leaning away from reflection and toward a quieter kind of performance: look at me, a man in tasteful contact with wisdom. The more I am tempted to look like that person, the less interested I become in actually being him.
So, I screenshot instead. Quietly. Like slipping a smooth stone into my pocket.
The embarrassing thing is that screenshotting can feel like a spiritual accomplishment. Captured. Saved. Archived. A little museum of seriousness in my phone. I can scroll through it and feel as though I am living among these ideas simply because I have kept them close. Saving a sentence is not the same thing as letting it change you. Collecting is not contact. Storage is not transformation.
That, I think, is why the poems helped.
A quote can be admired from a distance. A poem, even a tiny one, forces some degree of encounter. It has to pass through a voice, even if the voice is partly mine and partly a machine’s and partly something stranger than either. The poem does not replace the quote. It bends toward it. It answers it. It turns back and says: all right then, what does this sound like here?
This is only a sampling. A few cards from a much larger deck. A few doors from the hallway.
Here are a few of those returns.
Beginner’s Mind
Base line: Henry Shukman says beginner’s mind is recognizing that “we ourselves are new to this moment, to every moment, to now.”
Old room. New doorway.
The cup, the hand, the breath—still
arriving as first.
Beginner’s mind is not childishness. It is not ignorance. It is the recognition that this moment, however familiar, has never happened before. Not this arrangement of fatigue, memory, light, body, fear, hope, noise, and thought. The mind keeps trying to convert the present into a rerun. Beginner’s mind declines the shortcut.
The Three Musts
Base line: Albert Ellis names three musts: “I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.”
Three small iron gates:
me, you, world, each ordered to
open on command.
Ellis names one of the great engines of unnecessary suffering. Not preference. Not hope. Not aspiration. Must. I must succeed. You must understand me. Life must cooperate with my plans. These do not usually feel like thoughts. They feel like facts. They feel like the structure of reality reporting itself. Then reality fails to sign the contract, and I act surprised.
Expectancy
Base line: Seneca says expectancy “hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.”
Tomorrow calls out.
Today keeps setting the table.
I forget to sit.
Seneca cuts with embarrassing precision. So much of life is lost not to disaster but to leaning forward. Waiting through my own day. Treating the current hour as a lobby for the next one. Expectancy thins even good things. It steals substance from what is happening by assigning value to what has not happened yet.
The Miraculous
Base line: Nick Cave writes that “the everyday human gesture is always a heartbeat away from the miraculous.”
The spoon taps the bowl.
A child laughs from another room.
Nothing ordinary.
Nick Cave’s line reminds me that the miraculous is usually not dramatic enough for our branding. It does not arrive with thunder or a title card. It sits in the room with socks on the floor and water heating and somebody you love making a noise in the next room. The miracle is not hidden. It is simply competing with habit.
Walking Slowly
Base line: Thich Nhat Hanh says, “All is a miracle. So smile, breathe, and go slowly.”
Wheel, foot, floor, breath, pause.
The earth does not hurry me.
I practice hello.
I love this teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh, and I also have to translate it through the body I actually have. Walking is not always walking for me. Sometimes it is rolling. Sometimes it is negotiated movement. Sometimes it is fatigue having an opinion about the day before I do. The heart of the teaching survives translation. Move through the world as if contact matters. Move as if arrival is not elsewhere.
Taking Things for Granted
Base line: Aldous Huxley says human beings have “an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
Light at my finger.
Water waits inside the wall.
I call this normal.
Huxley gets at the frightening elasticity of human adaptation. We can get used to nearly anything, including the impossible. Warm rooms. Electricity. Language traveling invisibly across distance. The continued presence of the people we love. Gratitude is often treated like a virtue one ought to cultivate. I suspect it is also a form of accuracy.
Forgiveness
Base line: Sam Harris says forgiveness means learning “to restart the clock in the present.”
Set the old clock down.
The room is still here, breathing.
Now begins again.
There is a version of forgiveness that feels pious and theatrical, the kind that wants to be witnessed. I am less interested in that one. The kind that makes sense to me is simpler and more exhausted. Resetting the clock. Refusing to drag a dead injury from room to room and call that moral seriousness. Sometimes forgiveness is less like sainthood than like setting down a weight.
Empty Space
Base line: Alan Watts says the usefulness of a window lies not in the frame, but “in the empty space through which something can be seen.”
Frame praises itself.
Still, the opening does the work.
Light needs the absence.
Alan Watts was always good at reminding people that emptiness is not mere absence. A window is useful because of what is not there. The same may be true of attention. The same may be true of selfhood. Not every valuable thing is a thing. Space is not a failure of content. It is what allows anything to appear at all.
Calm Down
Base line: Czesław Miłosz writes, “Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.”
The ledger closes.
Praise and shame lose their sharp teeth.
One breath. Then the next.
Miłosz offers relief by way of scale. The little courtroom in the head never closes on its own. It has to be interrupted. The accounting of self can go on forever: what I did wrong, what I did well, what I deserve, what others owe me, how I rank against a fictional better version of myself. Sometimes the sanest instruction is the simplest one. Calm down. The ledger is not the world.
Mountains, Rivers, Mind
Base line: Dōgen says mind is “no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.”
No fence around mind.
River, moon, hand, breath, starfield—
all of it saying me.
Dōgen opens the whole frame outward. Mind is not merely a private chamber sealed behind the forehead. At least, it does not feel that way when attention gets quiet enough. There is experience, and then there is the habit of drawing a little fence around it and calling it mine. The fence is useful in some contexts. It is also, very often, where the trouble begins.
A Chain of Borrowed Voices
This is where the authorship point folds back in.
I collected other people’s words. I saved them as screenshots. I did not start by feeding them into Chat and requesting output. I started by noticing that certain lines stopped me. I started by wanting to keep them close. Later, I handed a few of them to Chat, and Chat turned them into poems. I read the poems and felt, now and then, a real flicker of recognition. Not despite the layers of mediation, but through them.
Teacher to app.
App to screenshot.
Screenshot to prompt.
Prompt to poem.
Poem back to me.
A chain of borrowed voices, and still something genuine can happen inside it.
That matters to me because I think we often confuse authenticity with purity. We imagine a real insight must arrive untouched, self-generated, bearing the scent of our own originality. Much of human life does not work that way. We are shaped by echoes, influences, overheard phrases, books we half-remember, friends who said one right thing at the right time, teachers whose names we forgot but whose sentences stayed. Now, apparently, we are also shaped by machines that can refract our own preoccupations back at us in forms we had not quite managed to make ourselves.
The interesting question is not whether the chain is pure. The chain never was.
The question is whether it points.
Whether it interrupts the drift. Whether it loosens the grip of “must.” Whether it reminds me that expectancy is expensive. Whether it returns me to the kettle, the floor, the voice in the next room, the shape of the day I am already standing in. Whether it makes me, however briefly, new to now.
That is the standard I care about here.
Not ownership. Not novelty. Not whether the poems can be credited in the cleanest possible way. The question is whether they open anything.
So, yes, I keep my little museum. I keep adding to it. I keep taking screenshots of sentences I do not want to lose. There are more than I can reasonably use. More than I remember taking. A whole private constellation of brief interruptions.
More and more, though, I am trying to remember that the point is not to build a better archive of wisdom.
The point is to keep being reached by it.
To be stopped by a line.
To be unsettled by a poem.
To become, however briefly, available to the present.
I sent some screenshots
A reflection came right back
I was curious
And they turned into something
Something strange and fast and new
