In any exhibition, however carefully it has been curated, there may come a point when we start to feel a little overloaded. Perhaps there is just too much information to take in, and perhaps there is just too little time to reflect. When this happens to me, I tend to stop trying to be present with what I see and feel, and instead I start to look for broad, easy messages that I can pick up and carry with me as I start to rush towards the exit. It is as if I have had enough of exploring the meaning of something and want to head straight to the cafeteria with a few bite-size answers to take away with me.
In real life, we barely have time to make sense of anything, before the next thing, and then the next thing, and then the next thing, are upon us. Even in the best of times we are relentlessly and inexorably rushing up to and then beyond events, adventures, triumphs and disappointments. And all the while clinging to our lifebelt of hopes as we are swept along on the currents of our intertwining lives.
In the stories I have shared with you so far, I have taken mere moments of my life and even those are edited heavily. It is obvious therefore that it is not my whole story. All our lives are so much more complex, varied, detailed and problematic than any carefully assembled gallery of stories; and yet we all carry a sense of the exhibition of our lives that we prepared to show to others. Indeed, most relationships start as an escorted walk through our personal exhibitions as we share and receive the pictures and stories of our different lives.
In an exhibition, if it all gets a bit too much, we can choose to stop looking at the walls of carefully placed stories and seek refuge in the cafeteria. However, in our real lives, it is so much harder to stop being with our stories. There is nothing curated about the clutter of our realities and how this tests our strengths and weaknesses in equal measure and to the limit. There is no metaphorical cafeteria in which we can walk away to rest our overloaded senses.
Despite knowing all of this, there is still a great temptation for all of us to only notice the perfectly placed stories that others share with us, while residing in our own un-curated messy reality. It is because of this that I want to take you to a very specific fragment of a conversation with my friend and collaborator Kay Scorah who came into my life when I was putting together an experimental event that we called LawFest.
LawFest was a joyous mix of Jazz, theatrical improvisation, poetry, stand-up comedy, a narrated stage version of the Leveson Inquiry and the Bach Choral Society. It was held in Cheltenham where I live and we decorated the venue with bunting, hay bales and balloons. We drank beer and cider, laughed at the absurdity of it all and created a few memories that will stay with me forever. LawFest didn’t become a regular event for us, but I hope to return to the idea one day. Its essence was to learn from all aspects of the performing arts, but where the audience performed and didn’t just observe. It was messy, unrefined, incomplete and rather wonderful. In the late evening warmth of a summer’s day, with a palate cleansing shower of rain to freshen the air, the LawFest audience melted away, a little bemused, heads wobbled, but smiling.
It was at LawFest that I had worked with Kay for the first time. She ran a contemporary dance workshop with a few brave lawyers revealing the emotions of their working day through dance. By all accounts they coped admirably.
I cannot do justice to Kay’s extraordinary and beautiful career in a few words in this place. There are just too many wonderful versions of Kay Scorah, but they include the biochemist (her BSc Hons in Biochemistry from King’s, London was followed by a year at the Max Planck Institut für Biophysik in Frankfurt studying the sidedness of anion transport across the erythrocyte membrane). Or the successful advertising executive, where (by the ridiculously young age of thirty-two) she had been on the board of directors of two London ad agencies and was a contributor and assistant producer on the 1990 BBC TV series on advertising and society, “Washes Whiter”. Kay the entrepreneur set up her own business thirty-five years ago, HaveMoreFun Ltd, with the objective of helping individuals, teams and organisations to be their kind and creative best at work. She is a teacher and tutor working on the Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme at Said Business School, and with the Teenage Cancer Trust and at Modern Elder Academy which is a mid-life retreat centre in Baja California Sur, Mexico.
And there is still so much more, including the Kay who is the improvisational cook. In 2016 she published her “Essex Road Recipes”, a deck of recipe cards designed to encourage people to cook from scratch and support local independent food retailers.
She is also the founder of an inspirational mentoring concept. Kay, told me that having learned so much from the young people that she had met through her work with Teenage Cancer Trust, and serving as an ally to a young Afghan as he worked his way through the process of being granted refugee status, and then working alongside a trans activist at London Southbank University, that she wanted to bring all their wisdom to senior business leaders. This became the Turning the Tables conference in London in 2020. And she continues to pair young people with business leaders in reverse mentoring relationships.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Quite simply, a film needs to be made and a biography must be written all about Kay. However, despite all of the riches I could write about, I want to focus on just one seemingly ordinary conversation, in one place at one time, and it’s not even the most precious thing that Kay has given to me, which is (so you know) that she taught me how to listen. In so doing she changed my work and my life for the better, forever.
In addition to the work we do together at our events, I meet with Kay for lunch three or four times a year. Typically, we meet somewhere near King’s Cross in London and over a pleasant light lunch we will talk about work, and families in the way that all good friends do.
In one of those conversations, I was describing to Kay some of my mentoring work and how life was pretty complicated for so many people. Not just their careers, but difficult family situations and the challenges we can all face from time to time with health, relationships and generally feeling overwhelmed. I said something like “And so it’s hard to help them find the answers, but I think just being with them is helpful.”
Kay has this wonderful way of receiving words as if the sounds they make really please her. She fixed me with a very knowing look and said “That’s nice dear, but perhaps there isn’t an answer. Perhaps there isn’t meant to be an answer. Perhaps looking for answers is part of the problem.”
We talked some more, but this was now the earworm for my day. I can hear Kay’s voice right now and see the smile and the twinkle in her eye. It felt like Kay had touched a concern with a kind thought and in an instant it had turned into something so much more positive.
A bit like LawFest, perhaps our exhibitions (and our lives) are meant to be messy, unrefined and incomplete. Perhaps, when we let go of needing answers, we can enjoy being with our lives a little bit more.
That lunch ended with Kay telling me she would now walk home along the canal. She said she walked or ran along the canal most days, and in reply I said something dull about whether doing the same walk or run every day ever got boring. Kay gave me another knowing look “My dear, it is never the same run if you are noticing everything that is different.”
To be continued.
Take care. Paul xx
