I need to blog more.  I need to write more, but I also need to release more and this is the best place I have for doing that.  I caught myself giving someone feedback on their work which was really an expression of my frustration with not feeling productive myself.  It's not enough to apologise to that person, I need to change my behaviour too – and that just means typing more often into a text box.

I've got a lot of London this week.  I went to Hard Art today, I'm going to a thing in Hackney tomorrow evening and staying over because I'm opening space for a client on Thursday morning.  I'm getting used now to remembering that I don't live there.  I can't just get a bus home from the West End.  In an ideal world I'd have a club where we could stay over when needed, but I don't think I'm there yet.  I like being able to get out of town at the end of the day and walk up the hill from the station.

I've started walking early in the morning instead of running.  It's better for my hips and knees, but also easier to do every day.  A forty minute stroll around the town gets me a solid 5,000 steps before breakfast.

At Hard Art we worked with Katy Rubin on Legislative Theatre.  As someone who started out as an actor, worked in public service for ten years trying to make things better for citizens and now makes things with people, for people, out of people, it was a lovely way to pull everything together.  There was a lot to take in, but we sprinted through it with just enough depth to get how powerful a process it can be.  

There I feel better about today now, having written about it just a little bit.

We did it again on Friday morning.  Sorry if you wanted to come but didn’t see a reminder.

It seems (to me) to be working, whatever it is and whatever it’s supposed to be for. I realised today for the first time explicitly that what I’m doing with the Friday “Living Culture Coffee Mornings” is most like calling an open space session to talk about “What are we doing to regrow a living culture?” And that my personal position is one of curiosity about that question and a willingness to engage in conversation about it, while doing it, rather than me thinking I have all the answers or that anyone else can come with all the answers. That’s always been true, and may have been obvious to everyone other than me, it’s just that I haven’t formulated it as explicitly as that before.

The things I remember talking about were secrets (in the sense of secret handshakes etc), wanting people to know that you exist but also wanting some level of exclusivity to avoid the bland, surface-level interaction of some open groups; the desire to be be part of a gang but not wanting to be part of any gang that would have me as a member; we touched on what happened recently when the Metropolitan Police broke into a Central London Quaker Meeting House and how outrage was felt and expressed by people who wouldn’t normally have any interest in places of worship; and how to do all of this in the context of a world where we’re all (potentially) connected online but recognise that connection online has its limits and that coming up against those limits is frustrating.

But there were six other people there, who will have different perspectives.

Related: a facebook post in the Open Space Technology group suggesting that this description of the making of “Another Green World” implies that Eno works in Open Space.

All this to say: it’s working, I’m finding out what I’m trying to do, we’ll do it again on Friday 6th June.