The Play/Pause Button

Or...Instructions on slowing down time.

Aug 07, 2025

I used to slow down time with nothing more than a cassette tape.

Remember listening to music on cassette? It was perfect, at least in my memory. Not like CDs, fragile and finicky. Cassettes were tough. Even when my red Firebird ate one, and it often did, I could pull the ribbon of knotted spaghetti out, wind it back into the shell, slide it into the deck, hit play, and barrel down the road.

But the real magic of cassettes was a secret I discovered while learning guitar. If I pressed play and feathered the pause button, sometimes pressing both and easing off, something happened. The tape slowed, just a hair, without stopping. Notes stretched. Time loosened its grip. That’s how I decoded some impossible guitar parts I loved. I wore out my Guns N’ Roses album this way.

I lived for little discoveries like that.

I still do.

Discoveries that offer insight, a new perspective, a bit of freedom from this fast-paced thing we call life.

Well, sad news. The Firebird broke down, this time for good. The tapes were slowly replaced by CDs (what was I thinking?), and now my Apple Music account offers every song I could ever want. Just a couple of old cassettes sit forgotten in a box behind my jean jacket, the one with the Guns N’ Roses patch. But the idea of the play/pause button never left.

It’s what eventually brought me to painting.

I think it started the day I bought my first iPhone. Suddenly I had a camera, always in my pocket. So, like everyone, I took pictures. But I noticed something: I was slowing down. I was looking, really looking. At a cluster of ladybugs, at the shadow of a rake stretched over new snow, at an old window becoming a living picture frame.

Time lengthens when you notice things. Just like slowing down the tape for those tricky guitar parts, I was stretching the world so I could take it in. My stride softened. I was less hurried. More awake.

Painting had never crossed my mind. It seemed too technical, too orchestrated, too rigid. Then one day I caught hold of a painting by Henrietta Berk, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I could see the play/pause button just begging me to press it.

So I did.

With a brush in hand, the play/pause experience came roaring back. I began seeing differently, absorbing more, processing more. And because paintings can take weeks, or sometimes months, to finish, memory became part of the work. The subconscious surfaced. Fragments of hikes, long drives, roadside glimpses, and images I didn’t even know I’d stored found their way into the paint.

Pressing play/pause is deliberate. It’s also easy to forget. Life rarely hands us those moments. We have to seize them, hold them, live inside them.

It’s not easy. But neither was learning that Guns N’ Roses solo.

Go ahead…press it.

Thanks for spending time here,

-Michael

Learning to See: An Artist's Journey with Michael T Smith

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