If we had to use three things to call you back from another dimension, what should we use?
A few months ago, my colleague William led a check-in for the group of facilitators working across 64 Million Artists’ academic leadership programmes.
The check-in was something like this: if we had to use three things to call you back from another dimension, what should we use?
The check-in didn’t even need explaining further, on which more later.
As I slowed down to think about what those things might be, the answers came.
The feel of the bark of an old oak tree.
The laugh of a small, red-haired girl (and more specifically, of course, my small, red-haired girl).
The song Stay Young by Oasis, played at a high volume.
The oak tree, of course, because it’s the view from my office. It’s the intangible thing that you can’t get in your home unless it’s already there when you buy it. The connection to nature, to the land, to time gone and time to come.
The little girl because of the love, and the pure unbridled joy, and the cheekiness, and all those other things that small children - particularly ones we love - do to bring colour to life.
Stay Young for all it represents: the summer of 1997 and the joy of discovering new songs by a band I loved. And not just on the album - Stay Young is the great summer anthem that never was, tucked away on the B-side of D’You Know What I Mean. Oasis often take me back to those days of adolescence and discovery, with the swagger, optimism and poetry of the North-West of England. And Stay Young, which I had been listening to repeatedly at the time, will blow the cobwebs out of anyone’s ears and might just summon me back from another dimension.
What I was most struck by when listening to everyone’s answers, however, is how much everyone understood the game.
The things people named were all expressions of the most aliveness of life. Sounds, sights, smells. Love. Nature. Music.
I love old stories, and how the wisdom of our peoples can be contained in them. And pulling someone back from the void, back from another dimension, back from the edge of death using those things that are most alive... That’s a part of old stories. That’s how we knew how to answer William’s check in game.
The question then, is: what are those old stories, contained in our game, telling us about our lives?
These questions of aliveness remind me of the greyness of the lockdowns, after the novelty of more time at home had worn off, and relieved for me almost solely by the return of the Premier League - a thing that was actually happening somewhere. Something live.
I remember thinking at first that I was incredibly grateful that we didn’t have any children, because of the practical grind of schools closing and more.
But months later, I was incredibly envious of my friends with children. Because our life had become so much the same. And children, tough as it was to logistically manage them, meant that life was colourful.
When Leah was born in December 2020, it brought colour, meaning and aliveness back into every moment of my life. It was incredibly good for my mental health.
We lived in another dimension in the pandemic and, in some ways, we live in another dimension now.
We are connected across computer screens to people on the other side of the world.
We learn and reflect and connect via an inter-dimenional device in our pockets, and via social media.
If we are not careful, we never leave the house.
A city commute may exhaust us, but it takes us through reality. Real reality.
Losing these moments as the world changes at pace changes our lives.
And more and more we may be looking for those things to bring us back to ourselves, to aliveness.
My friend Petia once said that there are few places in the world better than London on a sunny day. On those days, there is an incredibly release of aliveness as the pubs overflow, as people step into the thrill of connection and a city teeming with life.
But that was nothing compared to the release of the first time in a London pub after lockdown.
It isn’t as simple as to say that technology takes us away from reality.
I remember clearly Michael Neill being asked about his thoughts on Social Media. His response was to say that it depends. And that the real question is: when is it an expression of aliveness, and when is it a tool to deaden?
Pay attention to the things that bring you back to life, to aliveness.
And beware the over-use and over-reliance on the things that deaden.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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