Talking About Talking About Thinking About Change

I’m heading back to “real work” soon – or at least that part represented by an office job (which will see absolutely no geographical shift away from my study/io for the moment, so adaptation will be… challenging on that front) – and, as I ease back into morning meetings (unnatural!) and people with different priorities and vocabulary to those with whom I’ve been interacting of late, they’ve already been asking how my year of Sabbatical has gone, what I’ve got up to, all that. Unlike those who use Sabbaticals to travel the world, I don’t have a ready store of photos and maps to demonstrate, and the last 5-6 months of this have been… less than ideal, let’s say… What I will say about residencies and commissions and adaptation to extreme conditions and writing fanfic to keep myself sane (hyperfixation on research has been a great tool of denial) and finally being able to pick up the voice work again will – I suspect – sound super-vague, though I should really give these clever, sociable, professionally good communicators the benefit of the doubt! Besides: in some ways we’ve faced more of the same challenges this year than might have been anticipated…

And so, ironically, it’s the most recent work I’m engaged in that might resonate most with people whose job is managing business change, and the psychological stages that go with it. I’ve been creating a poem commissioned by someone who needs to use it to talk about death and grief in a non-religious way. (So obviously it’s one enormous metaphor and, being me, I’ve snuck in references to the four elements, water being somewhat dominant here.)

One of the most fascinating aspects of this process has been writing something that needs to fit someone else’s voice, to a certain extent, because this poem is to be a tool that will doubtless get reshaped by use. Today’s discussion included not only hearing which bits they felt they could use and others… less so… but having the client read it aloud, while I tweaked a couple of lines to fit that, noting what stumbled and what flew, making further notes for more deep-seated transformations later. This is something I do on an almost unconscious level when writing something for my own voice, but doing it for another feels almost like brand-new process for me, and luckily the client’s ability to self-reflect is both skilled and generously shared.

I’m pretty sure this process could not have worked without that trust.

It now occurs to me that this is (new analogy alert) like creating a garment for someone else to use - not only do you take detailed measurements at the beginning, but you have to get them to try it on so you can make some parts tighter, others looser, and ensure that yet others can stretch as necessary, depending on circumstances. Sometimes you have to unstitch an entire panel and do it again.

And the knowledge that the creation will shape the user as well as the consumer is a heady one.

This poem is going to be released publicly as well, at some point in the future, for other people to use if appropriate, and I find myself quietly excited by that prospect, again in a different way from usual. It feels good to make something for people to use, when art is so often seen as a decoration, a luxury, a nice to have, when it actually underpins so much of what it means to be human, connecting our present to past and future, communicating so many things and used everywhere. That this is to be, far more explicitly than usual, a tool, gives me a very calm kind of satisfaction.

And if that’s all I ended up having to show for this year, it would be a mighty thing indeed.

Update: The text of the finished piece is here.

River Cam, August 2010