Dialogue

"we engage in conversation in the belief that it holds possibility"

(N Burbles, 1993, Dialogue on Teaching, Therory and Practice - Teachers College Press).

it's perhaps a bit much to make such a generalisation and it's certainly not in the forefront of everyone's mind, but there is the potential of possibility in 'learningful' conversations. There can be a freedom in some types of dialogues - where thoughts, feelings and ideas are fluid, explored, where there is uncertainty, where you do not know where it is going to lead. This is the opposite of what Peter Senge described as 'ping pong' conversation where each comment is tossed out and not even 'received' before the next is tossed out. No-one really listening and no-one receiving.

Just the act of being prepared to listen can provide the right space for someone to come to 'see' what they didn't 'know' before, to allow something to emerge. That may be enough for a decision to become clear.

Some conversations stay 'on the surface' - they can tend to follow well furrowed patterns. They have a predictableness about them. These allow people to hold onto their view, their perceptions.

In "The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook" (Peter Senge et al) , Isaacs and Smith describe creating environments that promote collective inquiry (from the Latin, inquarere, meaning to seek within). These, by contrast, encourage people to approach dialogue with no results in mind, but instead with the intention of developing deeper inquiry, wherever it leads you. To do this requires a willingness to touch on what is 'difficult', to allow conflict, to allow confusion, to allow painful letting go of tightly held structures/beliefs - or in other words, "a willingness to touch the dangerous".

The conductor Benjamin Zander encourages his music students when they have made a mistake to welcome it with an attitude of "how fascinating"! In meaningful dialogue where deep inquiry happens, the moment of disagreement is likewise cause for celebration - an opportunity to see what is below the surface, to welcome it in and to see what happens by exploring it further in a collective way. In Action Learning terms, it is the recognition of the need for an optimum amount of 'challenge'. It happens when there is a degree of trust - where people feel safe enough to expose some side of themselves they might normally protect (whether from others, from themselves, or both). In this way, there can truly be a sense of possibility.

Starting from the End

Yesterday was the Film Preview of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" - the last of the eight films. One film commentator said "it is beautiful that we knew it had to end". There is indeed a 'sweet poignancy' of that knowledge - that knowing increases the richness of the tone and experience.

This reminds me of the interview with screen writer Dennis Potter in the last few weeks of his life when he described the beauty of seeing the cherry blossom, an experience enhanced by the knowledge it was the last time he would see it. The intensity coming from "the impossibility of further possibility" (Heidegger).

I have had a recent personal experience of this. My US friends Margo, Mark and Adrienne have performed as a band (Mad Agnes) for the last ten years and I have had the joy of hearing them play live on a number of occassions (including having them play at my 50th birthday party). A year ago Adrienne came to the difficult decision to stop, tired of being on the road and touring. They honoroured the process of that ending (not just for themselves but for their fans as well) by planning a final year - four seasons of concerts including their final UK tour last month. I went to one of the gigs and had both a smile and tears on my face for most of the time - relishing the exquisite sound of their music, lyrics, voices and harmonies and at the same time feeling sadness for the knowledge I would not hear that rich live sound again. In their final newsletter to their fans they quote T.S. Eliot - "What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from".

C.S. Lewis, in his book 'A Grief Observed' intimately describes his experience of loss after the death of his wife. He says "we think of this as love cut short: like a dance stopped in mid career.... something truncated and therefore lacking its due shape" but moves on to say " it is not a truncation of the process, but one of its phases, not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure".

These different things lead me to think of endings being transitions. Any period of change is an ending, a transition and a beginning. Organisations end, bands break up, relationships end, people leave a job after many years, old ways of doing things are replaced by new structures ...even newspapers (News of the World closing at the end of this week). Beginnings and endings are happening all the time - and sometimes we can feel the beauty in that.