Boat

The new (even more) online way of working has enabled organisations like ours to host an increasing number of all company meetings. These are the direction we have to move in when we have colleagues all across the world who should be given equal access to events and workshops hosted anywhere. An important session today was on the ‘resilience mindset’, designed to get us thinking about the challenges of being stretched and torn between multiple priorities, and how mindfulness can help manage this. It was a very positive first meeting on this topic and I look forward to embedding some of the ideas into my working days. One of the first exercises was simply for the facilitator to gauge how people were feeling, so we had to feed in some adjectives. Most people said things like ‘anxious’, ‘balanced’ or ‘stressed’. One person wrote ‘boat’.

To the question about what main things do people crave to make them more resilient, my colleague Pippa said: ‘the art of getting lost.’ This really resonated with me especially in this period where we’re travelling less and living our lives in a smaller orbit than we’re used to (which I realise is the norm for many). Probably my most enjoyable activity over the last six months has been the cycling and walking with no fixed agenda or route, and just exploring randomly, even though this is rural Cambridgeshire and not quite as dramatic as the Himalayas.

At lunchtime I walked around the city centre in glorious sunshine and snapped the Senate House looking as grandiose as ever. These days this building is principally used for graduations. In the evening at Joey and Dan’s house it was less about the art of getting lost and more about the art of getting drunk. As usual we imbibed much gin and plunged into much rich chat.