Travel to a Different Compass
Back to blogging with a new kind of exploration
It’s been a while. And…it’s been quite a year, eh?
This blog was originally sort of based around travelling — but just as I was finding my feet with it, travelling freely became a thing which was talked about in the past tense. It was something I sighed about over photos which were only two months old but which seemed like a glance at history.
So, this isn’t a travel blog any more. It’s time for a different kind of exploration.
As I, like everyone, try and work out what life is like now, I went to a workshop run by Creative Edinburgh which looked at working out your Values Compass. The session was based around weeding out which words, questions and statements guide your core principles, to help you make choices in your life, career, and deciding what you want to watch next on Netflix (the answer’s Schitt’s Creek). A new way to find direction.
And so, I did mine. At first flippantly, and then too earnestly, and then somewhere in the middle which is where I should try and land more often.
It was interesting that the more I wrote, the more that the words ‘kindness’ and ‘empathy’ kept coming up, whether I was writing about potential new colleagues, clients or life choices. I added ‘ambitious’ because that seemed like a good way to encapsulate my competitiveness, and ‘tenacious’ because the best people I know are incredible in their determination to keep going when others fade away.
Briana, who led the workshop suggested that we look at these words and decide if a new project actually fits with at least five of them. ‘Sustainable’ was so I could think about whether the idea which I come up with at 4am is actually going to work in the long-term, or if it’ll be a tiny flash project (which is sometimes ok) or one which will keep me warm in the long winter months.
‘Playfulness’ is connected to creativity, exploration and thinking in new ways about engrained ideas. It also stops me being scared of new, big, projects if I can think of them in more playful terms. As a quick aside: The Play Ethic by Pat Kane is a really interesting read about this whole idea and its potential.
And then ‘open’. This is something which I thought about a lot while travelling, and now while I plan the next chapter. Should I be the one leading this conversation? Should someone else be in it, or should I be passing the mic? How can I amplify the things which I think are important?
I’m currently working on a research project about ways to connect data and young people through performance. I’ll be writing about it more here: about the process of researching how data can be presenting, gathered and where performance and children fit in. I have a lot of questions. I think I’ll have more before I have any answers.
But, with kindness, empathy, openness, ambition, tenacity and playfulness I’m hoping that a sustainable, supportive plan can come out of the mists of 2020. It’d be nice to have you along for the journey.
