POEM: Unlearning

Image credit: N​ASA

This poem originally appeared at the end of my essay The Nonlinear Path of Unlearning, which I shared earlier this year. I’m reposting it here on its own because, embedded in that essay, it may have been easy to miss—and because it speaks to something that feels worth returning to.

​The poem was composed by me in collaboration with ChatGPT. That matters to name explicitly: I do not usually write poetry this way, but in this case the poem emerged organically while I was crafting an essay about unlearning, as a continuation of thought rather than a separate creative act.

The essay explained why I use the word unlearning so deliberately. Growth is often imagined as accumulation—more knowledge, more skills, more certainty—but much of real development happens through loosening, undoing, and releasing patterns that no longer serve us. Unlearning does not move in straight lines. It expands and contracts, circles back and moves forward at the same time, never returning us to exactly the same place. As I was thinking about it, this process began to feel less like a staircase and more like a rhythm—closer to natural cycles, to breathing, to the movements of stars and galaxies. This poem grew out of that image: learning and unlearning as motion, repetition with difference, and change that unfolds without a fixed destination.

***
Unlearning moves like this:
A rubber band pulled outward,
quivering with possibility,
straining against the habits of years.
Then--
a snap,
a recoil,
a return to familiar ground.

But each return is different.
The band, stretched and released a thousand times,
never rests in quite the same place.
The cosmos, swelling with galaxies,
never contracts to its original shape.

The path is not a straight line,
not a clean ascent from darkness to light.
It is a rhythm--
stretch and yield,
expand and fold,
like breath,
like tides,
like the slow pulse of a star.

And in this rhythm,
power is not in holding the stretch forever,
but in stretching again,
and again,
trusting that each recoil
lands you in a wider sky.