Making Meaning, Not Making Sense - A Conversation with Sam Crosby

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I spend time going out into the wilds and looking at maps. I really, really love maps. And I know when I've had my head in the map longer than I've had my body in the lived experience. And I feel utterly different at the end of an experience if I'm guiding it or if I'm not guiding it. It's related to the map.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. In the business of education, someone telling you that something doesn't make sense is usually the moment that we step in and explain, support, and resolve their confusion. Helping people make sense of the world is our job, isn't it? But what if making sense sometimes gets in the way of making meaning? In fact, what is our job as educators in creating opportunities for young people to cultivate meaning in their lives, however that might happen for them? I absolutely loved this conversation with Sam Crosby this week as we explored his work around the role of ancient myth, story, and eldering as we collectively respond to the times we're in that many see as a crisis of meaning. There are so many ways that Sam describes the work he does in the world, so here are just a few. He's a traditional oral storyteller and founder of Recalling Fire. He's a workshop host, motivational speaker, one-on-one coach, a crier, a surefoot, a group guide, and a fellow of the Bio Leadership Fellowship. Sam also has a fantastic podcast called Drop the Map, and you can find out more about him and his amazing work at samuelcrosby.com. So I'm conscious that you are probably told the story a million times, but your journey into the work, I wondered whether that was a good place to start or—

Yeah, I'm really happy to speak about my story and how I got here, and I think that that connects to everything and my worldview, so I'm really happy to do that. But I think where we just were felt really good. So we were just having a conversation before you press the record button about using story, using story. I have some associates that I work with. And if I go into an organization or if I hold space for members of the public, I have to have agreements or at least stake my claim to how I'm going to behave around story. And use is a word I'm really, really conscious of because I'm interested in a relationship with a story. I'm interested in— there's this sort of Copernican revolution going on at the moment that we're recognizing that science isn't a perfect thing because there are scientists like the scientists are going to solve every problem, and then we're going to get to this tiny little thing at the end where we have to say, but what about consciousness? How does that relate to our scientific understanding of the world? And I say all of this because I am fundamentally a rationalist. I was raised to be a rational thinker, to critically look at the world around me. Both my folks were in the armed forces. So when it was out, you know, in big sky nature, it was about traversing the landscape and having enough food on me, and if not, finding a good water source and that sort of business. And so the background has always been rational, always been make sense of things and have them line up and choose the best way forward. And, and the challenge of that and the opportunity of that, I think, is connected to quite an old idea, which is rite of passage, which is that in the rationalist aspect, the center of everything is the self. The center of gravity is how do I understand these things? Yeah, and I think the rite of passage, which manifests potentially these days in older people as a midlife crisis because they didn't have an opportunity to go through a rite of passage when they were younger, that actually the rite of passage, as I'm coming to understand or feel into a bit more, is about changing that center of gravity from the self to something bigger than the self. And really, I'm going to be gobsmacked if our conversation doesn't move towards that as a broader idea and meaning and what meaning-making might do for us, particularly as a way of relating to ourselves, to the broader world, and to other human beings. Yeah.

No, amazing. I mean, yeah, so a continuation of before we started recording. So for listeners, we probably dived in pretty deeply, but I just maybe perhaps if I could reflect a little bit as to why I feel a real connection with the work you're doing and why I wanted to have this conversation in a context of the podcast, which is about thinking about systems change and, you know, building new kinds of institutions educationally. But even already a lot of what you've spoken about there is connecting with a lot of those pieces because, so for example, storytelling as one particular thing is being invoked in many different places as a means by which we make sense of the world together, or as a means by which we might do social impact work, or we might get young people to kind of make a bit more, you know, deeper sense of the world. Then you, you know, you start then straying into thinking about wisdom traditions or other aspects of more indigenous ways of being that again are being invoked as we kind of almost scrabble around to try and understand what do we, how do we do this, right? Because it feels we've been in this quite clear, very rigid, institutions of modernity that we've, where we've been doing the work of educating our young people. And in a way, not questioning that, that's, it was pretty clear how that works, right? The hierarchies are clear, as you know, to your point about the rational scientific world. It's like, yeah, it's pretty clear what we're doing here. And that seems to be getting us into all sorts of problems and challenges. And we are missing, I think personally, we are missing a huge percentage of the sense of being alive, of what that means. Like, are we inviting our young people to really see the world, like whatever that word see means, or, you know, really make meaning or make sense of the world in a deep way by just teaching them, you know, some facts about World War II and the, you know, what's in the textbook and then testing them on it in exams. And, you know, there's lots of caricatures that happen around this kind of industrial thing. I think actually there's a lot of really well-meaning educators trying to connect with other humans and help them make sense of the world because they really are committed to raising young people. That's amazing. But I think the structures that limit what they do in those spaces are really difficult and limiting. And therefore, back to where I started, that's why people are reaching for these other kinds of ways of thinking and being and doing, a lot of which your work seems to be engaging with. And just finally, there is always that really tricky trap of using something as a tool for the thing we're trying to do, even if the thing we're trying to do is systems change or, you know, be differently or educate differently. And so lots of interesting little bear traps to fall into as we move forward, but I was just personally really moved by a lot of what you're doing and the stories that you're telling and the connecting with whatever that might be, myth, ancient wisdom, et cetera. So now I'm super happy to explore some of that territory with you.

Yeah, likewise, Tim. Yeah. And same for me. A real pleasure to have this time and to have a conversation like this. I think the action feels really, really important. Doing things feels really important and I, love the talking about the doing in order to make sure that the doing feels right. And as well, this sort of— I use the phrase reflective material quite a lot, and I think reflective material is one of the things that I would advocate, at least for myself, and if others are interested in playing in the idea for others too, to find more of in the world. Reflective material like volunteering is a really great example of reflective material, giving yourself to something seeing impact, seeing smiles, seeing change. Mythology is another great example of reflective material. Seeing parts of yourself that you might not have seen before reflected in 3,000-year-old stories and realizing, oh, we've been going through the same stuff the whole time. Okay, good. There's some solace there. And also a little bit of oneness again with, with one another and conversations like this likewise. So I hope that there's overlap and I hope that there's places that we can go to that will—

Definitely.

But also challenges as well. I wanted to represent, you know, if there's a challenge, then, then—

No, that's true. No, definitely. But Maybe where we could go is your phrase, drop the map, because that feels like a little bit of what we're trying to say we want to do, right? It's like, you know, your podcast is called Drop the Map and that feels like an important phrase.

Yes.

As an invitation to then do these other things that we're starting to speak about. So what, yeah, what, where does that come from and what do you mean by that?

Okay. Bless you for asking and bear with me. I am a storyteller and there are wheels within wheels here, so. Drop the Map and Recalling Fire— Recalling Fire is the name of my organization— they're two ways of naming a similar idea, kind of summarized by saying we've got it all inside us. It's all within us. Wisdom isn't learning something new, it's being reminded of what you've always known. Wisdom isn't aha, it's oh, I remember now. And so Drop the Map specifically comes out of the frame of recently starting to look and spend a lot more time and resource and working with people locally and around the world actually with the idea of elderhood. Specifically the journey towards elderhood. And retirement at the moment seems to be one of the most clearly outlined approaches that we have. You grind, you grind, you grind, you get to the end, you check out, you get a cocktail, you go on a cruise, you whatever, you work really hard and then you can relax. Seems to be the story that people who are retiring now were given as they were coming up through education, through their work and through their lives. And there is something serious happening in the world at the moment. There's a lot of challenge ahead of us. Tipping points, global systems, war, social disparity, the works, really. Metacrisis is a word saying that all of those things are just symptoms of the same challenge. And that challenge, as far as I see it, is a crisis of meaning. And retirement is suggestive that at the end of your working life, you are then put out to pasture, long in the tooth, over the hill, infirm, retiree, all of these pieces of language we have in the West, the modern developed West, around what old people should be seen as, what olders should be up to, which is just slowing down. And I'm interested in the idea of refirement. What happens when we say something like, you can't retire from the climate crisis. You can't, you don't have that option. But the beautiful thing is that if we're looking for purpose, if when we get to the end of our working life, we suddenly feel a loss, a lack of meaning and purpose, there's one ready to go, which is engaging again in your communities and with, with social challenges. And in any way, people who are over 65, the fastest growing cohort of people on the planet, they have the most resources, time, wisdom, life experience. And to think that an idea like retirement is apt for that point of life is a reversal of what The older ways of living might have shown us. And so Drop the Map is a suggestion that one of the ways to come back to the self, to answer the question of what matters most, which by the way is just another way of saying meaning. Drop the Map is a suggestion that first put down the models that you thought were the best way forward and see what's there, even if you then choose to pick up the map again. And it's connected to the poet David Whyte, who I heard say in a conversation once, you know you're on your path when it disappears in front of you. And the idea of a map means that someone else has already chosen the way, put the way markers down, given the names to the things. And what happens when you put that down and see what the trees are saying, see what the birds are saying, see what the world is saying to you? And there's more here, but I'll pause.

Yeah, no, I mean, that's— yeah, there are so many things there which I'd love to pick up on. A beautiful— just to again, maybe connect it to the work of this podcast is that for me, that kind of the map is not the territory, Kozibski idea is very similar to what you're talking about, because I think one of the things we do, or we think our role is as teachers, is to teach young people the map. And by not only teaching them about the map, we also kind of indoctrinate, use that word gently, but indoctrinate them into the idea that there is a map. And by doing that in a way, we kind of We take them out of the territory and we, we help them forget the responsiveness, their responsibility to the territory, to be in the world and respond. So that's why I feel really strongly actually that part of what we need to do differently in education is to, as you say, it's not getting rid of the map, but it's holding it differently as saying like the map is one piece of data that actually can be really quite useful sometimes when you're lost. Because it's ba— it has like, it has this embedded experience in it somehow to create that map in the first place. And at the same time, maybe that map is a bit out of date now because the world has changed radically, right? And the map hasn't changed, you know?

There's a mapping exercise that I would love to take into schools, which is imagine you're, you've gotta make your way from point A to point B and you're making the map as you go. What if you draw the, the size on the paper is relative to how long it takes you to cross that piece of terrain. So the marsh, even though it's only 3 foot across, it takes up the majority of the piece of paper. The road, which is 3 miles, is just a little stick, you know. So then we turn into the human experience of it. And, you know, this, this sounds a little bit kind of hypothetical and highfaluting, but we're going into a world where resilience and flexibility and chaos and finding a way to move something is going to be of paramount importance. And I think having experiential ways of playing with that. The converse, the maps that you and I have inherited— there are two things I'd like to point out about the maps that we've inherited. One, this phrase that we've just accepted, bird's eye view. Bird's eye view, seeing the world from above in that way, is nothing to do with the human experience. It's most relevant to our sat-navs and our cars when we're going, you know, 80 miles an hour. The, the experience of that isn't a human experience. You don't walk with the view of something from a bird's eye. It's obscuring what's actually there. And the other thing is, do you know what OS stands for? You know what an OS map is?

I know what an OS map is. And survey, I wanna say S is for survey.

Ordnance Survey.

Ah, there we go, of course.

They're developed for bombing runs. That's why Ordnance Survey was handed to us in the way it was. It was created for combat. And we— I spend time on the moor. I spend time going out into the wilds and looking at maps. I really, really love maps. And I know when I've had my head in the map longer than I've had my body in the lived experience, and I feel utterly different at the end of an experience if I'm guiding it or if I'm not guiding it. It's related to the map.

Interesting. And that makes me think also of what we were speaking to before we started recording, but just almost maybe the, like, the young modern equivalent of the map is, you know, getting lost in your phone, right? Because the phone is now the map. And then there's this like disembodying, you're getting pulled into the map, what, you know, this digital map that's constantly like attracting your attention and constantly asking for you to engage and disengage from the territory. And that's what, you know, you brought in meaning, right? That's the, cause I was listening to Forrest Landry this morning talking about how perhaps meaning is about something that is an alignment, very biological kind of organismic alignment of people in spaces and nervous systems in spaces. And so there's something very, again, like important educational work about helping young people to be with themselves, be with their own bodies and be with other bodies in space, in place, in the territory as a huge part of like the things that they're not getting when they're just lost in their phones and in the map.

Yeah, I agree. And again, so to kind of come down again and to bring this kind of to make it more tangible, I think, and to, to the everyday, to the lived experience of maybe the listener. I'm going to go broad brush and then come back to this point again. We're destroying our planet. We're destroying our planet. But I believe, personally, I believe that we are all fundamentally good. When it comes down to it, I believe that we're fundamentally good. So what's the disconnect? How can it be that we're destroying everything when we're fundamentally good? And the phrase crisis of meaning seems to be the thing which which gives me at least some tack, gives me some texture to the challenge ahead. We are living in a world at the moment where, I mean, it used to be there was organized religion and we had a meaning that we moved towards. In lieu of that, there's this kind of general sense of, well, if I do something, if I make my corner, if I make enough money and my family can be safer, if I pull towards this particular project, maybe I'm contributing. And the challenge of that work and when we have our phones, as you say, when we're looking at a thing, which is feeding us constantly, a map. We are living in a world where people are lining up to tell us what matters. Whatever media you want to look at, we're being told in every instance, in every advert. I got a postcard the other day, which had a print at the top next to the stamp, which was congratulating McIlroy on winning the golf. And I was like, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't engage with golf. I don't, you know, it was a message from a friend that had been sequestered to tell me about some of the sports news that was going on. People and, you know, systems and organisations, however you shape it, were being told from different angles what matters. So I'm suggesting, and I'm advocating for, in a crisis of meaning where we're destroying our planet, but we're fundamentally good, first is slowing down. And that feels important in the sense of just as you say, regulation, nervous system, the prey animals of the world, the antelope, when it's chased by a big cat, if they escape or go into a bush and shake vigorously until the adrenaline, the sweat has gone out of them. If we get an email that scares us, we just sit at the laptop hunched over and carry on with our day. We don't let it out of the nervous system, you know, stand up and move and let it go. So that physical mismatching is there. And then reflective material, as I say, like, is a good way to see the self more clearly. And then from there, we can decide what matters most to us and then commit to a life of meaning. And the word decide is really important because it's a grief word. Decide etymologically means to cut away other options. So when you decide one route, you cut away the, the myriad, the infinite other possibilities. And if you aren't cognizant of the fact that in order to decide one path, you're cutting away all of the others and feeling the grief and the heaviness of that. And by the way, grief is just loving what isn't here. It's a practice. It's not something we have to be scared of, I don't think. But grief is loving something which isn't here. How can we be in love with the ideas we've said no to in order to be in love with the idea we've said yes to? When actually what we do day by day seems to be is not make an active choice, move forwards living the life we're already living without recognizing that we have the option. Not grieving the other possibilities and therefore not thinking about what matters most to us, leaving ourselves wide open for other people to tell us what matters. And step by step, we move away from what we know is most meaningful.

I love that. And yeah, this idea of kind of deciding and choice-making, that's beautiful. Again, for me, it's all like, this is all educational work because we tell our young people what matters as well. That's what we do in school. We tell them all day, every day what matters, not what they think matters, right? So we're culprits for that. And at the same time, we're not always, I think, helping them to get better at choice-making, collective choice-making, individual choice-making, that idea of deciding. It's like, it's really important work, I think, that we are missing massively. Yeah. So many connections, cuz I think I'd love to come back to the elders point, but I think the elders also help with the wisdom of like, of what happens when you make choices and how to make better choices. But also just if I can, while we were on this point of the embodied, I really like when you talk about listening to the body voice. And I think that seemed to be both what we're talking about as kind of this in-person self-regulation, but also really connecting with, really helping to listen to what do I want, right? Like, as you say, we're swamped by other people's opinions and then listening to the body voice as you talk about it, but also then you use this phrase ancient clarity. And I think there's something really amazing in that in terms of, yes, it's in me, but as you kind of indicated earlier, it's in me, but it's also in me because it's coming from somewhere ancient, right? It's like, it's amazing, really amazing. So yeah, maybe you could just speak to that a little bit.

Well, I find myself partly in the, in the position of an apologist because I speak to myself from, you know, 5 years ago, 6 years ago, 7 years ago. I don't know what we would have spoken about, you know. If I, if I'd have rocked up the way I'm speaking today to, to myself of the past, I'd have said, I've got no time for this fella, I don't know what you're talking about.

Interesting.

This is, this is too high level. Like, I'm interested in the things I'm interested in and I don't need this woo-woo stuff, this, you know. So the first thing I want to say is that I recognize sometimes how for myself some of this stuff feels far away. And one of the things that I find really helpful is these little stepping stones across the ocean, right? That the body voice, as an idea, one practice I really love about the body voice is what language are you choosing to use to recognize what's happening in your body? So for instance, if you're playing sport or something and you take a knock and it really, really hurts and you, you leave the game early and you go home, whatever, and the first thing you do is start complaining about it My body hurts. My body hurts. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What language do you have available to you beyond hurts? Is it warm? Is it tingling? Is it sharp? Is it not sharp? Is it, you know, and in the same way mythology gives us this plethora of characters and archetypes, if you like, and these ancient ideas, what choosing new words for pain does is gives you something to reason with. It gives you some nuance beyond the language that you don't realize you're even using because you're just going through the motions. So Body Voice is an opportunity with language, with a simple step like that, to recognize how pain feels a bit differently than that. To say, okay, so you know what, today I was feeling this. I'm going to make a note of that. At this time of year, on this day, I feel like this. I'm in this kind of seasonal position. And tomorrow I feel like this. And now I feel like this. And now I feel like this. And this kind of constant, just gentle nudging of yourself and this is the key phrase, notice what you are noticing. To notice what you are noticing, because that is the bread and butter of meaning-making. If you notice your phone and notice yourself noticing your phone, it will grow bigger in your life. In the same way that if you notice a baby, your baby child, if you don't notice it, it will feel unloved. If you notice it, it will feel loved. If you love a games console, it will get bigger in your life. If you notice your gratitude, it will get bigger in your life. If you notice pain, it will get bigger in your life. If you notice warmth within the pain, maybe that's a slightly different tack on it. So it's about noticing what you're noticing. It's about the body voice. And the reason I was so enamored by the way you tied that together right at the end there is it's the same stuff. It's the same stuff that's been going on for thousands of years. It's, it's, it is just me and my experience and my leg that got hurt. And also that's everything because it depends how far you want to go down this track, but we are the universe noticing itself. We are the manifest consciousness of everything. And so when you have an experience inwards, you'll be more attuned to having experiences outwards.

Yeah, no, amazing. I mean, there's a kind of an illiteracy about our bodies, right? That we're kind of— and a lack of language for that. But then there's almost— there's also this kind of real illiteracy around the myths and the stories and the experience of the ancients that you, like, bring into all of these amazing stories. And I, like, again, it's just another way of, like you say, seeing yourself more clearly, right? Somehow having it reflected back to you in either your body or in these myths. Or so, yeah, it'd be interesting maybe to spend a bit of time in going into that more ancient space.

Yeah, thank you, thank you. I think that's, that's what I'd love to represent. And in terms of the work I'm doing and where I'm most interested, it's, it's mythology. And elderhood as it meets the everyday. That's the opportunity, I think. And I do believe that we're suffering a crisis of meaning. I believe that. And my story is connected to that. I— my eldest son came into the world with a profound brain disorder, and I had no purchase on the experience. I had no— there were no handholds. There was no tree to grab on the way off the cliff, you know. And my family were the same. It was the blind leading the blind. The healthcare system was the same. You know, I'll never forget the kind of the black tabarded technicians rolling into the room with the big chunky pieces of equipment saying, 'Oh, miracles happen,' you know, or, 'Who've we got here then?' You know, when we're being told that our kid might be on his way out. And then I bumped into an old story. And, you know, a few other things happened as well. Gorgeous moment in a few fields over there. Going out for a run one day, um, I bumped into an old story. And I'm a rationalist, I'm an atheist— well, that's up for grabs these days— but I had no faculty to deal with something that was so out of sensible space. There was no sense to be made of an experience like that. And I bumped into an old story and it just, it gave me something. It just gave me something. It was, it was open, it was willing. It didn't care what I thought about it. It wasn't asking for me to vote for it or buy it. It just was there and it offered itself to me. And here's the, here's the thing. Like water going down through layers of mountain rock, oral stories are told through the generations to the point where they're filtered and all we're left with is this mineral dense stuff, which does not make sense. I want to be very clear about that. It doesn't make sense. I heard a story about Wolverine, not the Marvel guy, the animal, shitting the world out of his ass. And it did something for me. Didn't make any sense. But what they do have and what they're absolutely stuffed with is meaning. And so, like, we know we're off. We know we're off track. We know something in us knows when we've spent too long on the phone or when the question creeps up of like, I don't know how to engage with my kids. Or I don't know if I'm still in love with my spouse, I don't know if my romance is— like, these kind of moments of, like, human experience, of relational human experience. Am I doing my life's work? Am I hurting the planet? You know, am I— the— all these questions that come up, we try to make sense of these things, and we, we know we're adrift when we have no way to move forward other than to just crush it down, go for a drink, go for a smoke, go on a holiday, go— like escapism and moving away from it. And the beautiful thing about old stories, if you can get past that kind of hearing once upon a time means it's for kids, right? If you can get past that, you don't have to come down off your hill and reinvent who you are to hear an old story. You don't have to change who you are or your identity or do anything complicated other than show up, see what happens to you. And I've got an argument as well for the once upon a time thing. So once upon a time, really what it means is now and every time. I've heard myth described before as something that always is but never was. Something that always is but never was. It's a truth of humanity inside the greatest lie ever told. And once upon a time is just a phrase that says it's happening now when it's always happened. But here's the argument I've got for it. I'm curious for those who might be listening to this, what movies have moved you the most in the last few years? And I would be willing to hazard a guess that they're kids' movies. I'd be willing to hazard a guess that it's the Pixar and Disney stuff. It's those films that are basing themselves on what we've come to have kind of collectively decided is for children. And I'm telling you now, old mythic stories, we're talking about Grimms, we're talking about stuff all over Europe, North America, we're talking about Arthur, we're talking about Robin Hood, all of these things. Yes, they're good for kids and they crystallize something of wonder for children. But when your adult life experience bashes into something which is 3,000 years old and you see something of yourself in it, it is just extraordinary. It's extraordinary. And you get to do that thing that you were kind of touching on earlier, which is something around nervous system, something around being with other people, being in a room when an oral story is in the room and your breath comes together and you're experiencing something. And we have a practice which we inherited from the Mythopoetic Men's Movement over in North America, which they call feeding the story, which is where you, you talk in terms of story, where you were most moved or where something happened to you. And having done this for the last few years, I've just seen, you know, retirees and school leavers look across a room with glistening eyes and say without words, 'Oh, we're the same.' Oh, wow, we are the same.

Beautiful. Yeah, we had an exchange before, and maybe I'd just love to dwell on that for a moment about this difference between sensemaking and meaning-making, because I think I, as I said to you previously, I really like the idea of what we do in education is helping young people make sense of the world, which is great and really important, right? It's like helping them to understand the maps, right? Which maps and which maps are better than other maps. And you know, there is an orientation that comes from somehow making sense of the place that you are, right? That's important. And it adds layers, it adds dimensions to your experience because you can, maybe you can name the trees that you're experiencing before you didn't know them. And, you know, adds a dimension to your experience that enriches rather than detracts. And at the same time, I really like this idea that we kind of get trapped in the fact that everything has to make sense, right? It's like, and even, even worse than that, in, in a lot of spaces, it has to make sense in language. It has to make explicit sense. We have to be able to explain what the sense was. We have to be able to use a bunch of sentences that say, oh, this, this meant that, and this, this means that. And I understand this because somehow that is, it brings some sense of knowing or certainty or whatever. Right. And these are currencies that we just spend our entire lives with in education, right? Knowing and being certain about things and understanding. So, so there's something quite kind of uncomfortable, I think, for an audience of educators around this idea of It doesn't make sense. That's the thing we are supposed to solve for in education. If a young person says that to you in a class, sorry, miss, it doesn't make sense. And you're like, oh, okay, now I'm, it's my time to step in and help it make sense. Right. And at the same time, maybe we're missing this whole world of meaning when it doesn't have to make sense.

Hmm. Yeah. Oh, this is, this is, this is so rich. This is so rich and such an opportunity for our times, I think. And the, the, I've already used the word apologist. I've already spoken to my previous rational self. I'm going to try this in a third way. I'm interested in balance. I'm interested in balance. When, when you start walking towards ideas like archetypes, there's a sort of, there's a, there's always a center line. There's a too much and a too little, and both are chaos. There's something in the middle. I recorded a small audio piece called Rebalancing the Scales of Logic and Wonder, and it's exactly what you're, you're talking about here. So I advocate for wonder. I advocate for meaning-making kind of as a priority over sense-making, but not because I think it's a priority. I think it's a priority of our times. Right, right.

Totally.

I think if you imagine, like, I need a better metaphor for this, but imagine like a speedo on a car cluster, right? The speedo on a car spends the vast majority of its life on zero. I mean, this is a whole nother conversation about climate-related challenges that we have where the vast majority of our cars are sat still, but let's not go into that at the moment. For the vast majority of the time, a car's speedometer is on zero. I'm advocating for every now and again jamming it all the way to the red line, knowing if you go 130 miles an hour, metaphorically, or go to the Autobahn— I don't know why I'm advocating for speeding— but if you jam it all the way to the red line, if you go 130 miles an hour now and again, you know it's going to go back to zero again. You know it is. So why not now and again, academics, people who are engaged in teaching and learning in classic ways, why not play around with ideas like not making sense? Because you can go back to the sense-making. That's cool. It's not, it's not one getting in the way of the other. It's one feeding the other. And so this is where I'm at. We will never understand in fullness what it is to be. I believe that. Why would we bother trying to understand love? What's the purpose of understanding love? Maybe there's something there. Maybe there's a cracking TED Talk actually that would fly in the face of what I'm saying here. But my question is, what's more important? We're back to the same question as the start. What matters to you? Does it matter more to you to understand love or to experience love? And so the word understand, I love etymology. I'm no expert, but I love it. I'm a massive dabbler. I was going along one day, and I realized I've never looked up the word understand. And we use it all the time. And now that it's in my face, it's one of the most ridiculous words I've ever seen. Understand. Is the word we use to know, to talk about our big brain consciousness of everything. Well, you've chosen the word understand. What kind of nonsense word is understand? And what it has its roots in, in Middle English, is more closely related to standing within, actually. And so when we use the word understand, we have these words apprehend, grasp, grab, like these, these, like, they're words of domination. They're cultural colonizing Martin Shaw, who I'll speak about in a second, Dr. Martin Shaw, talks about the idea of pinning the butterfly's wings. As soon as you've put it down, it's no longer alive and it's no longer living. And so words like apprehend and even get a handle on—

yeah, yeah, right.

Can't get a handle on anything that lives. When you say you're getting a handle on it, you're immediately saying, A, you're dominating it, and B, it is non-animate. There is nothing in the animate world which has a handle. Leg, wing, appendage, gill, branch— give me the lot. None of them are handles until we until we say, as our human selves, I understand this in its fullness, and I've got a handle on it, which means I've killed it, trapped it, put it on the wall, and now it actually has a handle. But in the Middle English roots of the word, to stand within, it's more suggestive of, to me, standing in the middle of a hurricane, standing in the middle of a hedgerow maze. I'll never quite have this or own this, but I can experience it. I can feel it in my body. I can touch it. I can let it graze me. And so again, Martin Shaw, who I saw last night with Blind Boy, actually, the Blind Boy podcast. They've just had a conversation last night and I'm sure it'll be available in the coming weeks and months. It was a really interesting conversation, which touched on a lot of sort of similar themes. But he talks about this idea of kenning, and kenning is to ken, to know, you know, you know, the Scottish phrase, "I dinna ken," I don't know. It's like this idea of finding different names for the same thing. Yeah, so for example, the way that we've tried to talk about meaning-making, we've come at it from a load of different ways now already. We've said a lot of different things, different metaphors. We're kenning it. We haven't said that we get it and then we've got it, but we found a couple of new names for it. And I'm really interested in the idea that academics and— what, what pile should I put myself in here? Meaning seekers, spiritualists, I don't know, the storytellers, whatever camp I find myself in— that, that actually I'm interested in all of the different approaches of naming the same thing in different ways and recognizing that we'll get to the end of our lives still not knowing fully what it is, but just that we have different ways of seeing the same thing. And slowly it takes a bit more shape. So I, I think there are some things that we just don't want to know, like love, in the way that we mean understand. And actually what we mean is, is we, we would like to be in the middle of it and letting it wrap around us and taking a position of I don't know, let's find out together. I mean, I'd love for our poli— the first politician to say that would just be rapture.

That's true. No, absolutely. And it's good connection there in the one thing is it makes me think just, I really appreciate the idea of balance. I think that's something I think really profoundly important about that, the kind of the duality we get. Especially now, especially when there's kind of urgent challenges and big questions that people are grappling with. There's a kind of a, there's a purism that comes in of like, I figured it out. This is the way, come and follow me down this way. Cause this is the way that will lead to the, you know, the future that we all want. And there's too, too much othering that happens in that, right? It's like everything else is wrong or, or even worse. Right. But the fact of I don't know, something about just timeless paradoxes that have always existed, right? Things exist simultaneously that are really contrasting and oppositional and, you know, and there are loads of them. It aren't just one or two, you know, it's not just a binary, but there is friction between ideas and ways of being and different things that, like, that's just part of being in kind of really diverse ecosystems. It's how nature works, I think. Doesn't work in this like beautiful, harmonious, you know, Disney kind of way. It's like there's real challenge, there's blood, there's gore, there's like, there's death and the death makes way for life and all, you know, all of these things that are, you've gotta hold all of them in a way, right? You've gotta hold it together. And so that idea of balance is like, is critically important to really embrace all of that. And I think again, in the kind of stories that you're telling, like, you know, the wolf Crossroads story, like there's real paradoxes in there that you're just like, I don't know, there's no, there's no right answer here. It's not like, it's not obvious which is the right way to go. There's something else going on when you're holding the paradoxes. And that's, that feels like a really important thing again, to invite young people to like get comfortable with that.

Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. I totally agree with the, with the par— and I think actually paradox seems to be the place we can all play. Paradox seems to be, in my experience, the place that mythologists and scientists can gather around. Where paradox happens seems to be the gate between science and spirit. That, that, that's— there's, there's an agreement that's happening there. I would say though, I heard that I don't think we need to hold paradox. I don't think we need to embrace paradox. The tone of what you're suggesting, I agree with. I think the language is what I'm challenging, which I think it's more of like a washing over. I think it's more of like a— I'm an advocate for awe. I'm an advocate for letting the twist of a seagull in a blue sky put you on the ground and remember that you have lungs to breathe. Like, I think being awed by all of it instead of trying to have it is maybe the potential. And I have a friend, a guy called David Aula. He's absolutely bonkers, brilliant theater maker. You'd have a great conversation. And he's been working in organizational development and just Great guy. And he challenges the, have you seen those, the memes of the kind of the picture of today of what the world looks like? And then a picture of if all humans didn't exist and it's like cities that are bouncing back and, and there's greenery everywhere and wildlife and the ecosystems are flourishing. And his, his argument, which I think sits alongside the almost the Braiding Sweetgrass approach of like, you know, we, we are here as custodians and humans are crucial parts of this living ecosystem, which I think is worth exploring too. Kind of alongside that, he's saying, well, no, that's nonsense because who's taking the second photo? Who's there to experience the greenery and the flourishing ecosystem and say this is a flourishing ecosystem? Like meaning and understanding and holding and embracing and letting and awe and all of that stuff. These are all human experiences. Like there probably is a one, there probably is a one thing and a one way that everything works, but we're humans. So we're doing our best to try to have some semblance of making it fit inside our brains and in our bodies. And that's why we fail because it's just numinous. It's everything.

Yeah.

Do you remember XKCD, that comic? I don't know if it's still going, but I think it was a mathematician started a cartoon, really clever. And there was one I remember where he was talking about how different standardized approaches end up being like, there's like a thousand of them rather than just one. And it's like this. The first cell is, it says, somebody says, hey, we have like 18 different ways of doing this thing. And somebody goes, 18?

That's ridiculous.

We should have one universal way of seeing all of this stuff. And then the final cell is, now there are 19 different ways. It would just, so if we're going to be in an education system, if we're going to be talking about students and young people that are coming up, trying to have one way of looking at things and one standardized way of looking at things, when we know the future is chaotic and fluid, actually, maybe we should be talking about individual approaches, individual skills. Here's something I'd like to add on as well. We live in a time now where we have to name ourselves, right? We, we, as I said earlier, we kind of have, kind of try to initiate ourselves with the blind leading the blind with our peers.

Yeah.

We get nicknames when we're in school, but these days we choose our own social media handle. We make our own online brand. We have to choose an email even, which doesn't seem like a big deal, but We choose the clothes that we wear, we choose our identity, the posters on our walls, and so on. There was a time where we would be named, or even a different place in the world still, where the people would gather around you at a certain point in your life and say, hey, we see you as this one thing or these five things. And without other people feeding back into us what we think until we get to our funeral, by the way, which seems to be the only time we speak truth about somebody that we loved, without there being moments of us being told what we're being seen as, what we're skilled as, how we're compassionate, and so on. We get sold, which is the story I was told when I was a kid, which I think is damaging, which is you could do anything, you could be anything. I think that's kind of slightly hooked up to neoliberalism in its way, but the, the danger of saying you could be and do anything is you have to decide, and the risk is yours, and the responsibility is yours. And it shouldn't be, or it doesn't have to be. When a community can gather around somebody and say, we view you as this and strong in this sort of thing, I, I could see that really working well in an education setting where instead of there being a standardized approach for all, there's more focus put into how can each of these individuals be seen and be, and be nourished in their own individuality and their own loves and their own, you know, direction. And, and then you don't get to the end of school and go, I guess I'll decide the rest of my life right now then and choose a track that I'm on and Yeah, absolutely.

And it really, really connects with, I think some of those types of impulses show up in things like personalized learning in very kind of, you know, captured ways of like, you've got loads of choice, but we, you know, we want to personalize your experience and you get to choose your own adventure, but we'll give you the things that fit you. There's some similar kinds of impulses there, but it's not, it's definitely not a community. It's a very individualistic frame, I would say. Whereas what you are talking about seems, sounds much more like taking us back to the beginning where you started with the elders is like the community has a responsibility to be with that young person, knows them and is helping them to become the thing they are, hesitate to use the word destined to become, but you know, there's something there, right? Because all the language gets captured by the Disney-fied stuff or whatever it is or overly determined. But at the same time, there is something obviously unique about Sam and about Tim and about the, you know, ourness in the world and we show up in the way, but then that's done in partnership with the people we're around. So I think there's something else happening, but with what you're talking about.

And it's tying two of those ideas together. In organizations, for example, if you play with an idea like elderhood, you'll quickly realize there's a difference between elders and leaders. I shared something quite recently that again is a conversation with David, the guy I mentioned a minute ago, that when the shit hits the fan, when something really bad happens in an organization, when the merger gets announced and we know that there's going to be 30% of people are going to be laid off, who those people look at in the room when that news comes in, they're the elders. They're the elders. Even if they're nowhere near the top of the pyramid or in the hierarchy, even if they're 17, when people look at the person and go, oh, I'm scared, can I have a chat with you in the pub? We need to have a conversation. There's something about elders and leaders being different things. In an education setting, similarly, what would it be if there was a recognized— if you had a blind ballot and everybody wrote on a piece of paper who they would go to in times of trouble, and that person was lifted up as the elder, and that elder said, okay, I've listened to everyone in the room, and these are the names I'm choosing for, for you as an individual. He'd go out into the world, these are the names that your institution saw you as. That's one sort of working model potentially. And another is really tied to my life experience, which I'm sure has some universality to it, which is the kind of the report card, right, of, you know, the English teacher saying, and the drama teacher saying, Sam was really engaged, he shows up early, he really loves his work. And then, you know, the whatever the physics and the DT teacher saying, he was distracted all day, constantly making jokes. I don't know, you know, If those two people talked, if those report cards talked to each other, the sum total might be something like, it seems to be that he's leaning into language and love. And so, you know, we think as a group that actually we would like to give him this name or recognize him for these things and say to him, look, yeah, still come and have a look at these things over here. Still do your physics and do your DT, but recognize that this is the name that you're wearing and you didn't have to claim it. You didn't have to claim it for yourself by taking the piss out of other people or being bullied. Right.

Somehow it was noticed. You were seen. Exactly. And that really connects. A long time ago, I had a conversation with Todd Shire, who wrote a beautiful book about teaching. And I actually think that's what some of the best teachers do. They see young people. They like, they build a relationship with them and they really deeply see who they are and they meet them there. And then they say, like his example was, and you know, this one particular English teacher who was like, I think you'll like this book. You know, just at a particular moment when, when he needed that book, when there was something in his life going on where he needed some of the wisdom that was in that book, she saw him and she gave him that book. So I think clearly that's not only teachers that can do that, but I think in a way some that marks out some of the best teachers are the ones that are able to do that. But maybe there's some elderhood thing going on there too, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and I think there's this duality with elderhood and I'm, I'm really starting to major on this now. And actually, it's the next episode in the podcast that I'm working on a manifesto around elderhood at the moment and working with people locally and around Cornwall, challenging elders with ideas like elderhood. And a few really interesting challenges are bubbling up, like hearing almost in every instance, I couldn't do that, who would listen to me, I've got nothing to add. There's kind of this deference mode.

Right. Yeah, it feels like, it feels like a weighty mantle to wear, right?

Yeah. But actually, I think with the right introduction and playing in the right way, it didn't ought to be because— and this is kind of the part of the point I wanted to make, which is part of what it appears to be to represent elderhood is to detach your popularity from your opinion, is to be able to say what you're seeing without it actually making a, a change or a judgment on yourself. So for example, when my boy was born and I was going through the worst of it I had an experience out in nature that I've, I've since kind of come to judge would have been the role of an elder had I already had one in my community, which was to tell me what was happening, to reflect back to me what was happening.

Yeah.

To say, yes, you are going through this. Not to make a value judgment, not to say it's good or it's bad or it's hard or it's easy, or this is what you should do, or none of that stuff, because that's all sweeping it away, right? Just to say what you are experiencing is real. It took a moment in nature because there was no somebody to tell me that. And so there's something about that being part of the opportunity of an elder. And, and I think the bit in terms of kind of how it connects to what you were just saying was, imagine as part of the experience of retirement, you were seeing— imagine at that single moment of, I get to put all of these things down now and I'm free and I've got no weight and I can go out into the world and going, oh wow, No, no, I'm retired. That means obscurity. That means imposing on my family. That means going to a home. That means, you know, becoming less important in society. And actually, what if in that moment you were seen? What if in that— and this is a really interesting other challenge to young people, including people who are 60 and older as young people, depending on who they're speaking to. Part of the challenge of elderhood, part of the work of a manifesto and this sort of approach, is that the The power is in the hands of the youngest. The power is in the hands of the youngest to go towards their elders and say, I see you, I recognize you as somebody who has seen more than I have, who has not advice and not answers but stories that might guide me. What are you going to do about it? How are you going to show up for me? What agreement are we going to make today that you'll stick with? And see them and let them be seen. I, I don't know if I properly fully articulated it earlier, but the way to say it is when we're about to face the biggest loss of purpose in our lives, leaving the working world, is the opportunity to recognize, I think, that then comes the highest purpose that there is possible to have, which is guiding the youngers, which is making a world for younger people to be able to come into and not to separate and not to walk away, not to retire. Yeah, to refire.

Beautiful. And I mean, in a way, there's something really interesting there as well, because the young people themselves, many of them are questioning the purpose of going into a system that is killing the planet, right? That, you know, I'm gonna go and be a doctor, an engineer, a banker in this game A kind of way. A lot of young people are saying, well, hold on a minute, that seems to be taking us down this ridiculous myth of infinite growth on a finite planet. Weird story. Maybe I don't wanna do that. And there, you know, there's a lot of young people I think questioning even the purpose of going in. So you've got this really interesting meeting point of the ones coming out and a lack of purpose, the ones going in questioning the purpose and, you know, maybe some uniting big questions about how do we navigate this time together?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're coming to a point here, I think, where we could do some really interesting tying of all of these things.

Yeah.

Which is something like the would-be elders of today. And by the way, I said earlier, I'm really enamored by the idea of the journey towards elderhood because that's relevant to everyone. As soon as you start using the word elder, you get into who is, who isn't, do they have to be younger? Do I? What if they're a bigot? What if I don't, you know, whatever, all the rest of this stuff. Journey towards elderhood. It's an aspiration. On the journey towards elderhood, those who are alive today, to the would-be elders who are free of the working world, who potentially have time to volunteer, who have some life stories to offer, generally speaking, in my experience so far, weren't raised with elders. So the best that they can do is A, recognize that, probably didn't have a rite of passage. Probably didn't get named when they were a teenager, maybe even had a midlife crisis because they recognized that something serious had to change in their lives. All of the accoutrements of what Manda Scott talks about in the kind of the trauma culture that you mentioned last time we spoke. Yeah, the best they can do is pretend well enough, pretend the position of the elder, pretend to be reflecting what's truth, telling their life stories and not advising and answering questions directly, disconnecting their popularity from their opinion, all of these things. So that my kids who are 5 and younger today can see a model of elderhood so that by the time they get to that age, they've got something that they can pretend a little bit better. Then we have that intergenerational response to what is, if we allow ourselves to accept it, an intergenerational wounding. It's been generation after generation of stiff upper lip, keep yourself to yourself, stranger danger, everybody stay together since the Industrial Revolution or before. We've inherited this and we don't have to buy it. And this idea of intergenerationality, lo and behold, what does it unveil? Ancestors, which is mythology, which is listening back through time so that we can speak forward through time and be of service to ourselves. And this is the central spinning hub of it all for me, which is all of these ideas are not unusual. They don't feel difficult, they don't feel highfalutin. Listening to an old story, you know, to get— show me anyone who hasn't really at some point enjoyed Tolkien or Arthur or something like that and gotten something from it, even when they were kids. Where this stuff lives is in the heart of meaning-making. When you slow down for long enough and ask yourself what matters, recognizing how often you've been told by other people what matters and what should matter to you, this is the stuff that surfaces. Love, my neighbors, my food systems, my way of moving in the world that, you know, we are all, I believe it, fundamentally good. And at the moment, we are fundamentally distracted. And I think there's a way of moving between those two things. That's why I advocate for— and yeah, you've just said it beautifully— what happens when youngers and elders speak to each other and we can go across those generations. I think that's more of the same.

Yeah. Oh, amazing. No, helping each other recall the fire, right? No, thanks. I'm just— I love it. Really, really so much here. And I just, yeah, I'd really invite people go and look at your, your work, your website, your podcast. There's so much there in terms of conscious we've been talking about the stories and haven't heard you tell one, and you tell them with such resonance and power. It's beautiful. And so yeah, really would recommend it highly to everyone listening. And no, thank you for your time.

Really, really appreciate it. Thank you, Tim. And yeah, just to say, the, the, the, the podcast, Drop the Map, it's on Spotify, and you should be able to find it if you search for it at Recalling Fire. The first episode is about the crossroads and the wolf. And the full story's there too. And I also wanted to represent that more and more I'm working one-on-one with people. And so the question of what matters, that's where I'm playing in the sort of reflective material that I'm offering. So yeah, just a real open heart for people like you and whoever's listening to say, great to be exploring this territory together. And there is no one answer, but this is a fun place to play.

Amazing. Thank you, my friend. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.