My week has felt fractured and segmented, i’ve failed to find good focus and have felt frustration: so it was with some trepidation that i turned to the manuscript on ‘Togetherness - Otherness’ yesterday, to see if i could tease some value out of it.
Well, to my surprise, i was able to, largely as a result of the input of Susie, who has started collaborating with me on this work: we are finding a nice way of painting colour around each others ideas, and it helps maintain a momentum.
I ended up enjoying my time immersed in the document, and then did a new illustration to go with it.
I notice that i’m using images of ice and snow for this work, which probably relates to the way people describe inclusion, and exclusion, or ‘togetherness’ and ‘otherness’ in terms of feeling warm or cold! We literally ‘cast people out into the cold’ or get a ‘warm feeling of togetherness’. Perhaps this is the visual imagery i will use for the book, but that is down the line.
This work explores how we are together, and how we are made ‘the other’ - inevitably it is an exploration of difference and similarity, of exclusion and separation. And there is an uncomfortable dimension in that ‘exclusion’ is a natural feature of social systems, not specifically an aberration.
By being together, we create the other. Not necessarily as an act of deliberate exclusion, but because we cannot be endlessly socially cohesive. It is part of our social nature to be ‘close’ to some, and away from others.
My aim in this work is to explore this as a guided reflection, much like ‘The Humble Leader’, but to include individual experiences as fragments of dialogue.
It’s early stage and imperfect work, but i feel important.
Quiet Leadership
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Best wishes
Julian
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