Culture & Reflection: The Urgency of the Essential

When I learned of Edgar Morin’s passing on May 29, one of his reflections returned to me immediately:

By sacrificing the essential for the urgent, we end up forgetting the urgency of the essential.

I have carried that sentence with me for days. Perhaps because it points toward a quiet dilemma many of us are living, often without fully recognizing it.

We inhabit a culture of acceleration. Everything arrives marked urgent. Messages. Opinions. Deadlines. Notifications. Expectations. We are encouraged to respond quickly, decide quickly, produce quickly, and remain visible while doing so.

At times, it feels as though life itself has become organized around immediacy.

Yet lately I find myself wondering what all this urgency is pulling us away from.

The most meaningful dimensions of life - beauty, wisdom, love, creativity - tend to emerge slowly, often beneath the noise, requiring a quality of attention that our age seems increasingly reluctant to grant.

Long before I encountered Morin's writing, I was drawn to the spaces where certainty softened. Poetry, art, silence, and the invisible architecture beneath appearances have always revealed more to me than fixed positions or definitive answers. There is a particular richness that emerges when we resist the temptation to simplify what is inherently complex, when we allow ourselves to remain in conversation with mystery rather than rushing toward conclusion. 

Morin dedicated his life to that conversation. 

His insistence that life ecology politics culture emotions and knowledge are inseparable at a moment when polarization is widespread.  He defended multidimensionality, openness to uncertainty, he insisted on complexity, at a time when the world seems increasingly eager to divide, categorize, label, and reduce. Not complexity for its own sake, but as an act of respect for reality itself.

Human beings are not isolated fragments. Life is not a collection of separate compartments. We exist within relationships, tensions, contradictions, and interdependencies that cannot be pulled apart without losing something vital.

Morin remained intellectually alive until his final days, continuing to challenge reductionist thinking and reminding us that human reality cannot be understood through isolated pieces alone. His passing feels significant not simply because a great thinker is gone, but because the questions he spent a lifetime asking have become increasingly urgent.

His work feels less like a theory and more like an invitation.

An invitation to remain curious.

To resist easy simplification.

To recognize that wisdom often lives in nuance.

While reflecting on Morin, I found myself thinking about another writer whose concerns seem surprisingly close to his own.

In his beautiful essay In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki reflects on our relationship with light, beauty, and perception. What appears at first to be a meditation on aesthetics gradually reveals itself as something deeper: a defence of subtlety in a world increasingly fascinated by brightness.

Reading Tanizaki today feels strangely contemporary.

Lately, I have noticed how difficult it has become to leave anything open ended, unsaid, or unexplained. We seem increasingly uncomfortable with ambiguity, eager to illuminate every corner, clarify every position, and make visible what once might have been allowed to unfold in its own time.

Yet some things reveal themselves precisely because they are not fully exposed.

Working with images for most of my life has made me attentive to what lies beneath immediate appearances. The most powerful photographs are rarely the most descriptive. They reveal something, certainly, but they also leave room for discovery. They invite us beyond what is visible toward what is felt.

Perhaps this is why I find myself drawn to thinkers like Morin and Tanizaki. Both understood, in different ways, that reality cannot be exhausted by what is immediately apparent. There is always something more unfolding beneath the surface. A hidden relationship. A deeper layer of meaning. A mystery that asks not to be solved, but entered.

Tanizaki understood that shadow is not the opposite of beauty. It is part of its architecture.

Atmosphere, depth, intimacy, reverence.

These qualities emerge not through excess illumination, but through balance.

The same might be said of wisdom, devotion and passion.

The same might be said of a meaningful life.

Surrounded by endless opportunities to speak, respond, share, and position ourselves, we risk losing contact with the slower forms of attention through which understanding matures, creativity deepens, and identity gradually reveals itself.

We are becoming extraordinarily skilled at broadcasting ourselves and increasingly unfamiliar with listening to ourselves.

Attention itself has become fragmented.

When everything becomes content - material for consumption - encounter becomes more difficult.

When visibility becomes a primary currency, depth can quietly lose its value.

And yet what nourishes us most rarely arrives through exposure alone. It arrives through presence. Through contemplation.

Through meaningful and vulnerable conversations. Through beauty.

Through those moments when we are no longer trying to extract something from life, but are simply meeting it.

Perhaps the task before us is to protect the spaces where depth can still survive within our modern world.

To make room for silence.

To protect the unmeasurable, cultivate the patience required for insight to ripen.

To remain receptive to the fragile, the hidden, the paradoxical, and the true.

To remember that presence is not passive, but profound.

Perhaps what is at risk is not simply our attention, but our capacity for the miraculous.

The ability to remain in relationship with what cannot be fully explained.

To encounter beauty without immediately seeking utility.

To allow mystery to exist without demanding resolution.

To recognize that some of the most meaningful dimensions of life emerge precisely where certainty ends.

This is why poetry still matters. Why art matters. Why contemplation matters. Why the invisible dimensions of life matter.

They reconnect us with what modern life asks us to forget. 

Morin speaks of complexity. Tanizaki speaks of shadow. Beneath both lies a deeper invitation.

A reverence for life in its irreducible fullness. 

A recognition that reality is always richer than our categories.

More mysterious than our explanations, and more alive than our systems of measurement can fully contain.

Perhaps this is why the essential feels so urgent today.

Not because it is disappearing.

But because it is increasingly being drowned out.

Beneath the noise remains something quieter.

A return to wonder.

To beauty.

To love.

To nature.

To  those dimensions of life that cannot be optimized, accelerated, or fully known.

Where mystery remains intact.

Where meaning is felt before it is explained.

Perhaps the essential has been waiting there all along.

Written by Arline Malakian, Shared by AM Visual Communications — where vision becomes distinction.

COPYRIGHT 2026 | all rights reserved  Arline Malakian