I loved Ivo Gormley and Matan Rochlitz’s little film Running
https://youtu.be/OaOOWoMWvMI
They had the simple notion of interviewing people while running. They found that the longer the project ran, the deeper their conversations became. There was a quality to speaking while in motion that took them into a different space.
In my work, and in my own day-to-day life, I keep learning how vital it is to keep up a level of physical activity. We really do spend way too much time sitting down.
And in meetings, too much time sitting down behind tables. This puts us in a trance state, as if all we are is thinking machines, concealing and suppressing a lot of the things that makes us human. It makes us stupid.
Sadly, sitting behind tables/desks, especially big ones, is strongly associated with high status. We create a doom loop of high status, in which analysis and a particular kind of cleverness trumps action. The inventor of the daleks is the apotheosis of this way of being.
Davros combines his physical immobility with plans of desperate grandiosity. He unleashes massive and terrible action but with zero integrity. Whatever anguish he feels leaves him stewing in disembodied malevolence.
I suspect a lot of the time, people in these long sitting meetings slide into grandiose fantasies, calling them action plans, that tend to a similar disconnection from reality. They’re sort of right that action is needed, but it might be something humbler and closer to home they need to do. Possibly just going for a walk, or maybe risking a prototype of something instead of more fantasising. Moving connects us.. it connects us to ourselves and to each other.
