Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind

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And because you know I will not interrupt you, you will want, when you finish, to know what I think, too, even if we disagree deeply. You open your heart. And because you in turn promise not to interrupt me, I open mine. Then one day, when I was 23 and in my first job, teaching English, the Head of the English Department, Peter Kline, invited me to write a book with him. He assured me I could do it. The result was Physical Movement for the Theater (Richards Rosen). It sold to schools and libraries and all my friends. Council thinking time (2 minutes): The Facilitator gives the Council a couple of minutes to jot down legibly on a piece of paper their initial thoughts. (These notes will be given to the Presenter at the end of the process.) Apparently you have to have a bio. So I started one. But I wasn’t sure what you’d want to know. I guessed I could do the usual, listing and linking you to the books I’ve written. But you’ll find all of that in ‘Books’.

This felling begins by facing the emptiness of our excuses for interruption: “I must clarify; I must correct; I must look smart right now; I must enrich; I must follow my own curiosity; I know where you are going with this; I need to take you elsewhere; your unformed thought will be less valuable than my formed one; I am more important than you are; I look stupid not talking; no one needs to listen this long; you will never stop.” As living and working become more complex, the lessons and practices here will shift a sense of chaos to one of clarity and a mindset of fear to one of hope. It could not have come at a better moment. This promise and its luminous effects are different. But humans cannot see difference all at once. Our predispositions, our rituals, our norms – in this case interruption and its frayed and fractious outcomes – are our habituated context. They are our reference points for what is. So they are all we see.

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And that matters. Interruption diminishes us. It diminishes our thinking. In the face of it, our own thinking barely has a chance to form. That means that our decisions are weaker; our relationships are thinner. Interruption of thinking is so destructive, in fact, that what we have produced as a species, however advanced it may be in the animal kingdom, is probably inferior to the achievements the uninterrupted human mind might have produced over those eons. We know it is not really polite or considerate, so sometimes we apologise as we do it. But we keep doing it Keeping the promise of no interruption is a tough job, because this promise is an vast galaxy of a thing. It stretches past our all-at-once field. It defies our gulping. Its whole cannot be parsed, and yet it has to be to be understood. I have seen people claim this promise, sell it as their skill set, and not come close This generous, useful and important book is a delight to read and will fundamentally change the way you interact with people' - Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler, authors of The Communication Book Peter wanted to do his next book by himself (on opera), and he suggested I do one by myself (on dance). So I did. Rosen called it: Enjoying the Arts: Dance. I loved writing it. It involved going to New York City to fabulous library archives to see films of dancers I adored, all on microfiche. Don’t worry if you have never heard of that.

verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ I read Jane Eyre that summer and thought that her life would definitely qualify her to write. I fantasised about braving the English moors but didn’t feel too hopeful sitting in Clovis, New Mexico. And then there was more. And More. What we had learned about thinking environments in the ten years since Time To Thinkwas astonishing. I didn’t predict it. This is different. Thinking for yourself is different. The conditions are different. The results are different. The attention that produces them is different.’

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Polarisation is not a result of disagreement. It is a result of disconnection. When we disconnect from each other, when we see each other no longer as human beings but as threats, we polarise. And the first, most forceful disconnector is interruption.