storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want* (Toni Morrison)
Apps can give us a number; only people can provide a narrative. Technology can expose mechanism; people have to find meaning.** (Sherry Turkle)
Yesterday, I wrote about how imagination needs reality – because our personal stories are not necessarily the truth, but also how reality needs imagination – because it can be altered (through foresight, intention and love).
Only humans can imaginatively and creatively dwell in the space formed by reality and imagination. Technology, at this moment in time, cannot.
One of the technologies I use in my dreamwhispering work with people is Clifton Strengths. I have worked with more than 500 people using this means of identifying our talents and abilities. It’s a brilliant tool, but I know it’s the conversations that follow the analysis results where everything comes alive, becoming a story that is about who we are and what we want to do in the completeness of our lives, not simply finding our next best job.
By relying on well-told stories, we ignore the real truth, the universal truth of how the world actually is.* (Seth Godin)
One of the rewards of solitude is an increased capacity for self-reflection – the conversations we have with ourselves in the hope of greater insight about who we are and want to be.** (Sherry Turkle)
Self-reflection not only allows us to see the truth and reality of who we are but also imagine how we can change. If you like, we see the clothes we want to take off and the new ones we wish to replace these with.
Research, though, appears to indicate we are increasingly struggling to move into and remain in solitude where our self-reflection will take place. Sherry Turkle points to times of boredom and anxiety as being natural moments to move inward and to reflect, but we are now more likely to distract ourselves with some form of technology, even though this in turn may lead to more anxiousness or boredom.
Through our self-reflection, we produce our personal stories; Toni Morrison wrote:
storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.^
Seth Godin warns us that our stories aren’t necessarily the same as reality. We must, then, always be trying to bring reality and our stories together. Frederick Buechner wrote about how we find our purpose where our deepest joy meets the world’s greatest need.
Wallace Stevens wrote about the power of imagination needing to be brought to bear the pressure of reality.^^
Our imaginations need reality as much as reality needs our imagination. These conversations, born in solitude, lead us into the most real and imaginative stories of all.
I think copying someone’s work is the fastest way to learn certain things about drawing and line. It’s funny how there is such a taboo against it. I learned everything from just copying other people’s work.* (Lynda Barry)
How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?** (“Meno”)
Austin Kleon reminds me that I have learned so much towards developing my own values and creativity through copying.
I also read Dahl’s book to gain a sense of how he shaped stories. I read many kinds of book, trying to learn from different styles of writing:
Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around it, put the date that you’re doing the copying out, and then copy it out. You’ll find that you just soak into that prose, and you’ll find that the comma means something, that it’s there for a reason, and that that adjective is there for a reason, because the copying out, the handwriting, the becoming an apprentice—or in a way, a servant—to that passage in the book makes you see things in it that you wouldn’t see if you just moved your eyes over it, or even if you typed it.^
And then there are all the ideas to copy, to play with, to connect with others and turn into something else.
I see all of these as conversations I am having. I listen to someone, I journal out their ideas alongside others, I post them here. First of all, these are conversations with myself. It’s how I find myself. It’s how we find ourselves. It’s a place on a journey to somewhere else.
There’s something in these copying-conversations that is about faithfulness. Faithfully copying and trying out words and shapes and ideas and habits that others have to share with me requires humility and gratitude on my part – the most sure way of discovering myself and appreciating and valuing others.
It makes every face-to-face conversation we have a potential smorgasbord of discovery.
Online life was associated with a loss of empathy and a diminished capacity for self-reflection.* (Sherry Turkle)
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot LEARN, UNLEARN, and RELEARN.** (Alvin Toffler)
We are learning not to meet face-to-face, replacing such personal encounters with texts and messages and emails.
It’s not simply about using different ways to communicate. Sherry Turkle describes this as a movement from conversation to connection.
Each of the technological alternatives to conversation comes with learnings for us. Perhaps if we look at what we lose through technology is a helpful way of seeing what we are learning. When we’re in the same room talking with one another there are so many things happening: we say things badly and have to correct ourselves, we stumble with our words and thoughts and wrestle them out sometimes, we see each others face and body expressions including the light in people’s eyes when they’re looking at us, there are pauses when we see each other thinking and silences when we’re not sure what to think, we hear ourselves saying words and ideas we haven’t heard before and they develop into new things, we see the lean of the person towards us as they listen.
All of these and more are lost when we’re texting or messaging. These same texts can be heavily edited to make sure they are correct, offering no opportunity for a thought to develop. Heinrich von Kleist pointed out that in conversation we can find ourselves being surprised by what we say and we get to experience,
the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking.^
We are learning not to have such surprises and experiences.
This kind of connection also makes possible the avoidance of boredom and anxiety by allowing us to go to someone, something, or somewhere else. This is another kind of learning. When we avoid the painful or negative emotions we are not developing our brains in a way that allows us to develops empathy or reflection towards ourselves or others. Clifford Nass reported,
negative emotions require more processing in parts of the brain.^^
Nass noticed that people that those who avoided negative emotions were slower to respond to others and to themselves.
Alvin Toffler‘s opening words provide us with hope, though. We are capable of unlearning what we have learnt, and relearning better ways. It is not about avoiding technology. Technology is part of our lives. It is about how to live in relationship to each more richly with technology.
Part of this is enjoying the risky conversations in which new things emerge from the to and fro of unpredictable conversation that happens when people meet each other in an undistracted way:
The thrill of “risky talk” comes from being in the presence of and in close connection to your listener.*
I cannot count the times in a conversation when I have found myself saying things I had not intended to say that help me to see something in a new way, sharing an idea that I hadn’t thought about before, connecting previously unrelated thoughts and ideas with another, doors appearing where before there were only walls.
These surprises never happen when I’m texting or emailing or messaging.
Afraid of being alone, we struggle to pay attention to ourselves. And what suffers is our ability to pay attention to each other, we lose confidence in what we have to offer others.* (Sherry Turkle)
When here thoroughly know how good we are, we can readily (and creatively) think well about how to improve. It is as simple as that.** (Nancy Kline)
Welcome to a month of exploring conversation in which I’ll be reading through Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation.
It may seem an unusual place to set out but conversation begins with how we speak to and listen to ourselves.
Turkle imagines Henry David’s Thoreau’s three chairs – one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society – as a picture for her exploration of a “virtuous circle of conversation” that has been interrupted by technology; as Nassim Taleb puts it here:
Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker’s life while convincing him that it is becoming more efficient.^
I came upon the word ardent (to be very enthusiastic or passionate) as I was reading this morning and thought it a good word word to describe how we need to turn up in our conversations.
First of all, we need to be ardent on the inside, in the conversations we have with ourselves, as well as being ardent on the outside.
It’s easier to turn on the radio or iPad or check messages on our phones, wonderful distractions for taking us away from the conversations we need to have with ourselves, the ones that help us to identify problems and work through solutions, to sense directions to take and find the means of pursuing these.
The great teachers are saying that you cannot start seeing or understanding if you start with “No.”* (Richard Rohr)
A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open towards the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.** John O’Donohue)
In an unfolding universe, there’s perhaps nothing evolving faster than a human life.
Different species take hundred of thousands of years, yet in a single lifetime, a person can be so many things, are able to begin and finish in completely different places doing very different things.
Part of the art to this that we have learned is to let go and let come. Even when the future is uncertain, we sense the possibility to be shaped with foresight and intention and love, so we let go, knowing that we carry with is what is most important of all.^
We are a mystery wrapped in a question.* (Alex McManus)
We are partners in the unfolding of the universe.** (Joseph Jaworski)
Whatever you love, whatever you’re passionate about, whatever your goals, allow them to move, to grow, to develop and, sometimes, to change, because there’s always more to come.
(*From Alex McManus’ Makers of Fire – eBook version.) (**From Joseph Jaworski’s Source.)
It is fashionable to espouse the latest cynicism. If we live in hope, we go against the stream.* (Eugene Peterson)
When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. […] The deepest irony about the young being cynical is that they are the ones that need to move, and dance, and trust the most. They need to cartwheel through a freshly burst galaxy of still-forming but glowing ideas, never scared to say “Yes! Why not!” — or their generation’s culture will be nothing but the blandest, and most aggressive, or most defended of old tropes.** (Caitlin Moran)
Cartwheeling through a freshly burst galaxy of still-forming but glowing ideas should be for everyone … is for everyone! As long as we say Yes!
Come, one and all, to the ever-open, freewheeling, never-knowing-what comes-next conversations that allow possibilities to emerge that we had’nt previously imagined.
Yesterday, I mentioned that my main read for October would be on conversations, and it’s going to be Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation, writing about the impact of technology, she observes:
It all adds up to a flight from conversation – at least from conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable. Yet these are the conversations where empathy and intimacy flourish and social action gains strength.^
We have fallen out of belonging. Consequently, when we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives we have not rituals to protect, encourage, and guide is as we cross over into the unknown. For such crossings we need to find new words. What is nearest to the heart if often farthest from the word.** (John O’Donohue)
When your mind is filled with love, send it in one direction, then a second, a third, and a fourth, then above, then below. Identify with everything without hatred, resentment, anger or enmity. The mind of love is very wide. It grows immeasurably and eventually is able to embrace the whole world.** (Siddhartha Gautama)
We can find ourselves caught in the harshness of our words, soapboxing in tweets and soundbites, on the far side of debate from conversation.
At such a time as we find ourselves in Britain, John O’Donohue’s words on “blessing the space between us” make for intriguing and hopeful reading:
Blessing as powerful and positive intention can transform situations and people.*
O’Donohue died in 2008 and so would have no idea about the timeliness of his thoughts for us. Although hopeful in the power of blessing, he was not naive, blessings are not akin to sprinkling pixie dust over a person or problem:
A blessing does not erase the difficult nor abolish it; but it does reach deeper to draw out the hidden fruit of the negative.*
From this we can deduce that blessing requires time and proximity. To go deeper rather than skimming off the surface requires that we put down our tweets and see the inadequacies of debate and find the necessary container or vessel for blessing being a conversation.
More than ever before I find myself challenged to explore conversation with others as an urgency for our times.
On my bookshelf at the moment, I have two books I’ll be choosing between for my main read in October: Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect and Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation. You may have other titles in mind and also be interested in exploring some way of rediscovering conversation. Let me know if you are.
John Steinbeck wrote:
In every bit of honest writing in the world… there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. ^
Where to begin? We perhaps need to become more like writers; these words from Steinbeck caught my eye:
As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.^
We begin when we move from judgement to openness.
O’Donohue wrote about how a blessing is an expression of the quiet inner light that is found in each person:
This shy inner light is what enables us to recognise and receive our very presence here as blessing. […] The gift of the world is our first blessing.*
O’Donohue opens his blessing For Love in a Time of Conflict with these words:
When the gentleness between you hardens And you fall out of your belonging with each other, May the depths you have reached hold you still.*
Moving from judgement to openness is not only about how we respond to the Other but also how we see and understand ourselves. We all are more than harsh words, more than judgement.
No pixie dust, this is the most courageous place to be.
THIN|SILENCE 
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