I like autumn, and every year there’s always a day when it clearly announces itself. Yesterday there was a little chill in the morning sunshine that marked the end of summer and sparked a certain purposefulness that I always associate with this change of season.
There’s some sadness in the transition. It may be the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, but it also triggers the seared memories of back-to-school. (By the way, if you’ve got kids, give them a break by joining my friends Chris, Rob and Alex and support a ban on homework.)
For me, September is looking busy which is great but it also marks the end of a month or so of unplanned solitude which I have greatly appreciated. Regular readers (all three of you) will have noticed I’ve had little to say here for several weeks. I have read very few blog posts and made fewer. I’ve actually not been mixing much with the world at all, and basically given myself permission to do almost nothing with any purpose, beyond eating and fits of playing World of Warcraft.
The experience kicked off in my days house-sitting in Cable Bay, New Zealand. This is a wonderful spot with views of sea and hills where you get to settle to a much slower pace of life. In our highly stimulating world, it’s sometimes great to be understimulated. I find this is a time where I really get to observe my own mind at work. I call this solitude, a very different experience from loneliness. I’ve enjoyed the benefits of thinking less and witnessing more.
That word, thinking, is a little tricky though. I don’t mean to dismiss thought but like David Bohm, I like to distinguish between generative new thinking on the one hand, and the mere recycling of old thoughts on the other. I find the better I am at not thinking, the more likely I am to generate something fresh, original and authentic…
Ive enjoyed reading Nancy Kline’s book, Time to Think. She outlines a few very simple but powerful principles to support that kind of high quality thinking in organisations. The one that sticks most in my mind is this: don’t interrupt people. As she puts it
Knowing they won’t be interrupted frees people to think faster and say less
I’d probably say better rather than faster, but that’s just a quibble really. Lately in conversations I’ve been practising not interrupting and realising what a gift it is to give someone attention instead of competing for it.
(When I close an Open Space with an open mike, I say that people can speak for as long as they wish, bearing in mind the desire of others to speak. I sometimes invite the audience, if anxious that someone is “going on too long”, to give that person more attention – not the instinctive less)
I suspect most of us rarely get enough time to hear ourselves think without the rigidity that comes from anticipating challenge. In a nutshell, I think that’s been my gift to myself this summer: the space to think differently. I think that this notion connects strongly to the Trusted Space that Rob has been so eloquent about lately. Rob’s talking about a space that we create between humans, and I think it’s also something we can create within ourselves.
