Street Wisdom
I love randomness.
I love serendipity.
I love wandering about places and just seeing what happens.
Today I experienced something I’ve been looking forwards to intensely ever since I first heard about the concept because it involves all three of those loves: Street Wisdom.
You might already have heard about it or read David D’Souza‘s excellent blog on his experience. You may even have experienced a session yourself. If that’s the case then I’m probably preaching to the converted. But if you haven’t, Street Wisdom is basically (in my layman’s words) a way of encouraging your brain to use visual cues from your environment to address a particular problem or question.
So this morning I pitched up at the steps of York Minster to meet David who was running our session.
I won’t go into detail about what exactly happened as I don’t want to spoil the event for others. David’s blog tells you pretty much everything you need to know but I will say that I had very high – and what I feared were impossibly unrealistic – hopes for the session. I’m extremely pleased to report that the session met all my unrealistic hopes. I’m totally a convert. I got the impression that not everyone had quite the revelatory experience I did so maybe it’s not for absolutely everybody but I felt that it got me in a place to focus on some stuff that has been niggling me for some time and that I haven’t been able to give any head space for a variety of reasons. “The street” really did give me visual clues that enabled me to work through stuff in a particular way. It even suggested some answers.
I also have to say that I found York to be astonishingly lovely – it kind of was in my memory (I last visited in 1987 on a family holiday!) but so often things don’t live up to your recollection. I’ll be fascinated to do a Street Wisdom session in my home city of Liverpool as I know it like the back of my hand and it holds so many memories for me – I wonder whether I’d get the same level of ability to lose myself when I am in places linked inextricably with my daily life…. I’ll let you know.
If you’re open to new ways of thinking and giving stuff that might feel maybe a tiny bit awkward at first a go, you have to try Street Wisdom.
I’m extremely grateful to David D’Souza for putting in the time and effort to put the session on and to Inji Duducu for making it possible as part of our Northern OD Network meeting.
Some days you just muddle haphazardly through from one end of the day to the other. Some days you do stuff that is potentially life changing. This was most definitely one of the latter.
For more information about Street Wisdom, visit www.streetwisdom.org and/or follow @DavidPearlHere on Twitter
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