Those answers are developments of ten ways of being with each other. I call them ‘the ten components of a thinking environment’. We will explore them in depth in a little while because when we live them, as a system of being, we and the world around us do begin to change.

This ‘thinking environment’ starts and ends with the promise not to interrupt each other. It really does. I know that sounds too simple a thing to change a life, much less a world. But that simple promise is loaded. Like an atom. Take it apart and you see an unimaginable force, a force that generates the brilliance of life, in this case the brilliance of independent thinking.

During that time we discovered that inside this promise not to speak, this

simple three-faceted agreement to stop interrupting (to start giving attention, to stay interested and to ‘share the stage’), there is a lot going on. Inside this promise there appears to be a kind of ‘coding’ for removing blocks in thinking. It appears that the mind, when not interfered with, asks itself a range of catalytic, almost ‘innate’ questions when it gets stuck, breaking through blocks for itself, so it can be on its way again. All of that seems to happen when the promise of no interruption is in place and the mind is soaring.

Let’s start with the first component’s question:

Where is your attention?

That is the groundbreaking question. Change where your attention is, and you change where another person’s mind is.

Attention generates thinking. Think about that. But maybe don’t think too hard about it because it will make you feel a bit sick remembering how absent it was from the things you were probably taught about being with people.

This puzzled me. But then I thought about this: on screen the promise of no interruption is broken, yes. But not by the listener. It is broken by the platform. And it is the listener’s promise, not the platform’s, that ignites the thinker’s mind. It is the thinker’s trust in that human promise that allows them to claim their own intelligence and fly. And although this means that one of the three aspects of the component of place – the room – is deeply compromised, the most important aspect – the listener – holds steady and perhaps does ‘double duty’ to make up significantly for the interruptive room.

We can create a thinking environment even in the dwellings of extreme disagreement. We can, quite simply and profoundly, promise not to interrupt. We can honour the three ingredients of that promise: to start giving attention, to stay interested in where the person will go next and to ‘share the stage’ equally.