Settings for time and attention

The programme I am opening up in 2027 is another expression of the same concerns, although it has a purpose of its own. I want to create settings in which people can give time and attention to questions that matter to them, free from the immediate pressure to turn every insight into a decision, a project or a deliverable.

Such settings offer opportunities to exercise capacities that are easily neglected in the demands of everyday life. Sustained reading and conversation, attention to places, encounters with unfamiliar ways of thinking and being, and the experience of doing things together can unsettle habitual understandings and open up unexpected possibilities. What matters in them is the practice of noticing, imagining, living with uncertainty and disagreement, and allowing oneself to be changed by an encounter. Whether such experiences will make us wiser or better equipped to face the world is something nobody can guarantee. What I can offer is a carefully considered setting, my own engagement, and the company of others willing to enter into the inquiry.

In one setting I work with organisations that must act and bear the consequences of their choices, and in the other I invite people to exercise freedoms of thought and attention that purposeful action so easily crowds out. I see them as complementary forms of a single practice, concerned with how we find our bearings, individually and together, in a world that cannot be fully known or brought under control.