Place
Doorway: Leica Q2
“Everybody can look but they don’t necessarily see.”
I feel much more settled now. It’s taken me nearly twenty years.
I had hardly seen the rickety old rural farmhouse that was trying to become our family home. Instead, I was rootless; a ‘global professional’ attending to the demands of multiple work interests: the ‘dream job’, status, prestige, a full diary, international travel and the place in the country. Success can be persuasive. Yet rather than the generative centre of a life worth living, our house had become a stop off for exhausted retreats between business trips. As life disappeared into a disengaged, fatigued haze, moments of a much longed for, deeper relationship with home nagged my consciousness.
But, as for many of us, lockdown stopped me in my tracks.
Working from home was a blessed relief. Yet just beyond the pinging in-box and never-ending schedule of Zoom calls, screen-life distractions let me wander into beautiful, compelling imagery of far distant ‘Insta’ landscapes that prodded away at my sense of incarceration. There was no chocolate box prettiness in my village, just a one hour walk around a residential dormitory community that had long ago exchanged any bucolic allusions of countryside idyll for the industrial functionality of modern agriculture.
Yet social media also invites us to attend carefully to the mundane reality of life. Images of ordinariness abound; garden flowers, the walk to work, our shoes, food, the books we like… So I took my camera and walked gently, within a carefully measured 1000 step radius, at a pace slow enough to let me return slowly to looking and noticing. My photographic ‘technique’, such as it was, remained simple. Whenever I encountered a view, vista, or anything that provoked an internal ‘Oh, wow…’, I lifted my camera and, holding back any questions of light, frame or composition, simply [click!] pressed the button. I published a photograph each day on social media - tentative and unsure; some of my images seemed ok, others were hopeless, repetitive, boring, useless…
At least my inner critic was having fun.
But it was the moments of ‘aesthesis’, [click!] that fascinated me; announcing themselves with a brief intake of breath, a literal ‘inspiration’ to mark a soulful exchange of sensory experience. I came to recognise them as a portal to a deeper experience of my surroundings.
Krishnamurti tells us:
“We always look at things partially. Firstly because we are inattentive and secondly because we look at things from prejudices, from verbal and psychological images about what we see. So we never see anything completely.”
Our task, according to Krishnamurti, is to see totally, not intellectually, verbally or emotionally; then we will live quite a different kind of life.
Which takes practice.
I’m still practicing: this won’t be done any time soon. But the photographic [click!] technique is simply a method and the quality of the image isn’t at all important. To misquote, McLuhan, the medium is not the message.
The message is that brief moments of attention, of seeing totally, help us find our place in the world.
Notes:
I’m very grateful to friends and colleagues who joined in and supported the #1000steps inquiry. Among them @eberlin @1000Rach @DrSusanZoll @mcwhitaker @StefanPowell @LPinching @dougshaw1 @Pauline_Holland @feastsandfables and many others who offered their time for conversation and mutual inquiry.
The project was undertaken as Action Research; the approach to research that we adopt on the Executive Doctorate In Organisational Change at Ashridge. For embryonic researchers, or those intrigued by the practice of Action Research, I can recommend the Handbook of Action Research (Concise Paperback Edition) edited by two of the exemplars in the field, Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury.
Finally, if the teachings of Krishnamurti might be of interest, take a look at the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust or try ‘The First and Last Freedom’ where he argues that truth can only to be found through self-understanding
