Weâve seen a lot, and we continue to watch, to notice, to see more. What we call a âthinking sessionâ is not a methodology because it is never finished. If it is anything, it is a kind of life form. Nature is too complex for us to penetrate fully or entirely accurately. So we cannot complete it. We can only keep our eyes open.
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Those answers are developments of ten ways of being with each other. I call them âthe ten components of a thinking environmentâ. 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 âthinking environmentâ 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.
I have said that we have also very recently begun to understand that the mind seems to think in âwaves and pausesâ, not in âpartsâ. (Formerly I thought the road to the incisive question consisted of âpartsâ and could be mapped. I was wrong. The mind is not so predictably linear.) It then determines in the pause the âjust rightâ question among those âinnate questionsâ to generate a new wave. As the listener, we are now able to navigate that same âpauseâ process to determine the right question when the person cannot do it for themselves.
This is what I think it takes.
Two things.
One, we have to get it, really get it, that one personâs generative attention produces another personâs new thinking.
Donât rush that.
Two, a personâs generative attention loses its power the very second it wavers. Attention like this has to be continuous.
Take that in, too. It defies 3,000 years of instruction in how to listen.
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 âshare the stageâ equally.
The problem is that there might be better ideas out there, just beyond the edge of our vision. But we accept early closure because letting go of a judgment is painful and disconcerting. To search for a new insight, one would have to put aside the comfort of being oriented and once again cast around in choppy waters for a new source of stability. There is the fear of coming up empty-handed. Plus, it is unnatural, even painful, to question our own ideas.