Last week, for four nights and four days, I was in Reno, for a training in Appreciative Inquiry (AI), which is an organizational development theory/technique that essentially suggests that if we ask positive questions and listen to positive stories, we will get more positive answers: possibilities-based thinking instead of deficit-based thinking.
It was an interesting topic, and would have been an interesting training except for the fact that, for whatever reason, these particular facilitators were not good for me. I don't want to disparage them, because I know don't know how they always are; they have supposedly a lot of experience, but for whatever reason, this particular training was a big tough. Maybe it was the group size - seven, which dwindled to six - and while intimate trainings can be good (and I've gone to quite a few of these weekend seminars), too few participants and the energy can really suffer, which happened in this case. Still, there was a wide range of experience and perspectives in the group, people who worked in law, education, government and the corporate sector. I was representing the corporate sector (yikes: kind of a weird sentence). I was also the youngest one there by a considerable margin (and I'm not really young anymore).
I won't go into the details, but I am telling a story about a Perfect Moment, and in order to get that flavor (because there's no...you know...PLOT points or anything like that), you need to get some idea of what this week in Reno was looking like. On one hand, I had this mixed-bag training on a wonderful topic. I also had this enormous, fun room (poker table, kitchenette and bar, and me all alone!) in my favorite Reno hotel, the Grand Sierra Resort, where I stayed on a semi-regular basis a few years ago when I was doing some work there for a couple of months. So I'd gotten a bit used to Reno, knew my way around at least the basic streets, even had a few favorite places to go. There's Bangkok Thai, with the delicious "sizzling (insert meat type here) platter"; and right across the street, Zephyr Books, a truly great used bookstore I love because you can find 100 year old books for $10 that are in decent enough condition to actually READ. I had my haunts, sort of, in my way - and this was my first time back, so I was looking forward to remembering my way around Reno.
I also met some interesting people in the training - including some who shared my frustration over and questions about the training/facilitation. I ran into these insta-friends after a solo dinner one night, and joined them while they ate. We laughed and strategized, and I told them a recent bit of annoying personal news, which I needed reassurance over (which they convincingly and sincerely gave), and I was very glad I met them. Even the other participants, and indeed the whole process, had its own fascination, even though it was a bit tedious; we got through it all together, and I did learn something. At one point, we had to do a group skit, and I got to play Helen Keller as well as gravity, so there was that.
And then, in the evenings, I enjoyed a few good dinners, and entertained myself gambling, which I can do. It's not for everyone, and most people who know me think it isn't for me, but I've been doing it since I was a young adult (grew up near enough to Vegas to make it the easiest weekend out), so I got used to it. It distracts a part of my brain I can't usually quiet easily, so I find it amusing, and I never gamble much, plus I seem to have about even luck. I played some quarter roulette (super cheap entertainment) with some drunk local just-post-college guys, a Australian couple, and Indian gentleman who didn't understand why his 18-year-old son couldn't gamble or even sit next to him. I met people. I had my ups and lows, and I took a lot of pictures of shiny strange decor, and so I was enjoying my time. I even got to swim.
But the week was, as I have said, not without its snafus. There was, for one, the upsetting personal news, which was something I was going to have to deal with in the future, so it wasn't as easy to accept and groove into and get over or whatever it is you are supposed to do when you get upsetting news (I'm still figuring it out; I get that all experiences are about understanding the message from your Higher Self / the universe, but sometimes I just need to work through it). There was, for another, the dry, low-energy group training with all its complex dynamics, and the getting to know strangers thing.
And then it was Thursday evening, and I had one more day of work before flying home for the weekend, and I was looking for Italian food. I'd heard that La Strada was excellent, rated one of the top ten Italian restaurants in the U.S., surprisingly located in the El Dorado Reno Casino, so I went, and it was closed. It was Wednesday. "It's closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays," the hostess at the next door restaurant said with veiled condescension, with a look that did not successfully conceal that she couldn't believe I didn't know that. "It has been for years."
"Well," I gently reminded her, "I'm from out of town." You know, a gaming town? People not from here? Anyway, La Strada was out definitively, so I Yelped Italian, Reno, and found Mario's Portofino Ristorante Italiano, which had great reviews. Thursday, Reno had become suddenly busy (dead Mon - Wed) and so I called to see if they were crowded, and did I need a reservation as it was 8pm.
"No, no..." a kind voice laughed. "It's a strangely slow night, come on down. We'd love to have you!" It was inviting, and the joint turned out to be right next to Zephyr Books (which is next to Bangkok Thai), which made it feel like synchronicity of a sorts. Out front, a couple was sitting at a table outside on this sort of covered patio/vestibule built there, in the parking lot, and she was standing over him, sticking an angry finger in his face and looking like she was about to skin him alive, and saying "Never, ever treat a women like that again," but it seemed like she was just dramatically telling a story - maybe it was real, I don't know. I went in.
The place was empty. They all greeted me - the hostess, the waitress, the guy behind the bar who recognized me from the phone call - and apologized that it was so empty. I was eating alone so what did it matter, I shrugged. It was fine. The waitress brought me my wine, helped me decide (manicotti? cannelloni?) to order the shrimp ravioli pescatore with Grand Mariner citrus reduction (who can no to that?), and brought me the cream of artichoke soup, which was a house speciality I'd read about; try the special when you can, I always say.
Now, I had my New Yorker, and I was reading this incredibly thought-provoking article by Lauren Collins, about the artist 36-year-old Tito Sehgal (lives in Berlin, born in Pakistan to an Indian father and German mother), who I had never heard of but immediately liked. Please take a moment to look him up, because I will never do him (nor the article) justice in this already-long blog entry, but in short, he does these live pieces (NOT performance art, for it is others that perform his work) which are hard to describe. Here's an example from Wikipedia that will give you the idea:
"In Sehgal's 2010 work 'This Progress' at the Guggenheim Museum, the artist empties the famed spiral gallery of all art work. The museum visitor is met at the base of the spiral by a child, who asks a small group what they think progress is. As they begin their ascent up the spiral ramp the visitors continue their conversation until they are met by a high school student who picks up the conversation. Further still, they are met by a young adult and lastly an older adult who finishes their ascent to the upper-most point in the Guggenheim."
He gets "interpreters" to work his pieces, normal people from all walks of life who tend to be intellectual and educated, and could use some extra cash. In the one going on right now at the famously large Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, there are 70 storytellers, and the entire work is simply the visitors encountering these storytellers, who do all sorts of things like spontaneously sing or move in unison, but also engage visitors in conversation to, according to the New Yorker article, "discuss moments when they had experienced either a sense of arrival, a sense of belonging, a sense of satisfaction, or a sense of dissatisfaction with themselves."
Crazy, wonderful stuff. Sehgal is very artist-y in other ways that could be seen as pretentious but I like: he doesn't fly, but instead sails when he needs to visit the U.S. He refuses to allow any physical representation of his work, written or otherwise - no catalogue, video, pictures. No written instructions even. And when he sells a work (which he has, in the $100,000's at least), there is no contract. He basically sells an IDEA. He has witnesses who verbally stipulate the rules surrounding the purchase, the future performances which is what they are buying (basically, the right to give the same set of verbal instructions to a number of people on what to do, where, when, etc). And the rules are specific - Tito or his representative must be involved in it, the piece must run for six weeks; even the guards who participate must be given such and such pay in addition to their regular pay, so they would know they were part of the art, and therefore take it seriously.
I love this guy, I thought. I get this - I see the possibilities, and it opened up my imagination wide. Then I got upset I didn't already think of it. Tito beat me to it, and what's worse, maybe I would never had thought of it. I was sitting there, eating my excellent shrimp ravioli with Grand Mariner reduction, and reading about Tito who was simultaneously blowing and reading my mind.
The restaurant was indeed totally empty, and the radio station they had on had been playing a long set of Frank Sinatra, which in this obviously old school Italian restaurant was more than fitting - it was not cliche but classic, mostly because they were playing Sinatra I didn't recognize. I was getting into this mood, of pensive, self-possessed thoughtful longing, with a little melancholy or nostalgia thrown in. I'd had this relationship kerfuffle I was fretting over, and now no one was in this supposedly popular Italian restaurant, and Frank was really singing with heart and soul, and sadness and hope ("Michael and Peter" was the specific song).
And the story of this artist was really moving me. I was having some sort of reaction to it - the reaction we all hope we have when encountering art, which is expanding, learning, exploring. I was thinking of this terrific woman I'd met at the training who was just someone I was instantly simpatico with, and then all he troubles the group was having NOT meshing and gelling, and then I began to think of the whole world, and how it does, or does not, mesh or gel, and how it's important to mesh, to connect. I was full of Appreciative Inquiry and creative possibility and white wine, and then I came to the end of the article, which I am going to reproduce in its entirety because the writing was quite perfect and it was part of what was to become my Perfect Moment.
The reporter/author was describing watching the "These Associations" on opening day from the pedestrian bridge that crosses over Turbine Hall, with the other gawkers. And s/he says:
"Just after noon, the crowd below began to move as a swarm. Like birds on the wind, the interpreters cut vectors across the museum's floor. Once in a while, as though the flock had hit a patch of turbulence, someone would veer off and coast on a different current. From the bridge, I watched a middle-aged man in a blue short-sleeved shirt and his companion, a sensible-looking woman with a leopard-print carry all, trying to pick their way through the scrum. They bobbed and hesitated, progressed a few steps and pulled back. They were rickshaws, trying to cross the world's most bewildering intersection. Finally, they gave up. The man took the woman's hand, touched it to his shoulder, and led her in a waltz."
Oh my.
Besides the fact that pretty much my favorite gesture and action in the world is the moment of taking the woman and starting to waltz, the very fact - the very fact that a man, a generic man, an extra I will never know, just some man who could be and is in fact any and every man - the moment of someone doing that, just giving up and over to the art, giving into the dance. It was such a beautiful moment, I could not help the tears that sprang to my eyes. The Sinatra, the week of tedious training on what was actually a life-affirming topic, the new friend(s), the funny ups and downs of gambling and the behavior of people who play roulette, the kerfuffle, the brave way I faced the kerfuffle, the strengths I was finding inside of me, my past, my present, my future and this really quite good pasta dish - it was all there, somehow, in that moment of human possibility, and in that moment of human possibility was all other moments of human possibility, and there I suddenly found myself: in the middle of an infinite field of grace.
The waitress came up. How is everything? What was I to say? My new training as well as my instincts (which I try to give into, but you know, they are against the norm so I hold them back sometimes) were telling me, I should somehow to try describe what just happened to this waitress here. I did my best to quickly tell her the story - out of town, here for the week, this Sinatra song, the artist (I summarized his work, his flavor as best I could), and the moment of the waltz.
Oh, but I am a cynic, she said. Do people really do that? Are we really like that? Yes, I said, I think so - the moment of abandon and trust and beauty, people are indeed capable of that. Maybe, she considered - maybe they are. Maybe life is, can be beautiful.
Well, we didn't say it like that; I can never remember dialogue, and I'm rusty at writing it. You get the idea: she got the idea. We exchanged whatever words or psychic thoughts or facial expressions or emotional empathy to get the idea across, from me to her, of hope, of possibility, of being more than you think you are. Luminous beings are we, waltzing, not this crude matter. Something of this, she understood.
She told me her name (Morgan); she hugged me, she said I made her night. No, you don't know, she said. There's stuff going on...you don't know that this really did make my night, just saying what you said. I sensed something had happened; unlike so many interactions, it wasn't like there was no there there; in fact, it was all there.
I paid my bill, gathered my things, and as I headed out the same crew that greeted me now gave me a warm goodbye. They apologized again that it had been such a quiet, empty night. It was fine, I said, waving, and as I slipped out, I overheard Morgan say to them, "It really was fine. Don't worry, she made her own moment."
That is the thing about a Perfect Moment: you get a lot more of them when you discover that they are both made and allowed. Created and arising, like Tito reading and blowing my mind. Perfect Moments happen when you are ready, aware and open to them. This was just one of them. May you have one soon. That's all.
It was an interesting topic, and would have been an interesting training except for the fact that, for whatever reason, these particular facilitators were not good for me. I don't want to disparage them, because I know don't know how they always are; they have supposedly a lot of experience, but for whatever reason, this particular training was a big tough. Maybe it was the group size - seven, which dwindled to six - and while intimate trainings can be good (and I've gone to quite a few of these weekend seminars), too few participants and the energy can really suffer, which happened in this case. Still, there was a wide range of experience and perspectives in the group, people who worked in law, education, government and the corporate sector. I was representing the corporate sector (yikes: kind of a weird sentence). I was also the youngest one there by a considerable margin (and I'm not really young anymore).
I won't go into the details, but I am telling a story about a Perfect Moment, and in order to get that flavor (because there's no...you know...PLOT points or anything like that), you need to get some idea of what this week in Reno was looking like. On one hand, I had this mixed-bag training on a wonderful topic. I also had this enormous, fun room (poker table, kitchenette and bar, and me all alone!) in my favorite Reno hotel, the Grand Sierra Resort, where I stayed on a semi-regular basis a few years ago when I was doing some work there for a couple of months. So I'd gotten a bit used to Reno, knew my way around at least the basic streets, even had a few favorite places to go. There's Bangkok Thai, with the delicious "sizzling (insert meat type here) platter"; and right across the street, Zephyr Books, a truly great used bookstore I love because you can find 100 year old books for $10 that are in decent enough condition to actually READ. I had my haunts, sort of, in my way - and this was my first time back, so I was looking forward to remembering my way around Reno.
I also met some interesting people in the training - including some who shared my frustration over and questions about the training/facilitation. I ran into these insta-friends after a solo dinner one night, and joined them while they ate. We laughed and strategized, and I told them a recent bit of annoying personal news, which I needed reassurance over (which they convincingly and sincerely gave), and I was very glad I met them. Even the other participants, and indeed the whole process, had its own fascination, even though it was a bit tedious; we got through it all together, and I did learn something. At one point, we had to do a group skit, and I got to play Helen Keller as well as gravity, so there was that.
And then, in the evenings, I enjoyed a few good dinners, and entertained myself gambling, which I can do. It's not for everyone, and most people who know me think it isn't for me, but I've been doing it since I was a young adult (grew up near enough to Vegas to make it the easiest weekend out), so I got used to it. It distracts a part of my brain I can't usually quiet easily, so I find it amusing, and I never gamble much, plus I seem to have about even luck. I played some quarter roulette (super cheap entertainment) with some drunk local just-post-college guys, a Australian couple, and Indian gentleman who didn't understand why his 18-year-old son couldn't gamble or even sit next to him. I met people. I had my ups and lows, and I took a lot of pictures of shiny strange decor, and so I was enjoying my time. I even got to swim.
But the week was, as I have said, not without its snafus. There was, for one, the upsetting personal news, which was something I was going to have to deal with in the future, so it wasn't as easy to accept and groove into and get over or whatever it is you are supposed to do when you get upsetting news (I'm still figuring it out; I get that all experiences are about understanding the message from your Higher Self / the universe, but sometimes I just need to work through it). There was, for another, the dry, low-energy group training with all its complex dynamics, and the getting to know strangers thing.
And then it was Thursday evening, and I had one more day of work before flying home for the weekend, and I was looking for Italian food. I'd heard that La Strada was excellent, rated one of the top ten Italian restaurants in the U.S., surprisingly located in the El Dorado Reno Casino, so I went, and it was closed. It was Wednesday. "It's closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays," the hostess at the next door restaurant said with veiled condescension, with a look that did not successfully conceal that she couldn't believe I didn't know that. "It has been for years."
"Well," I gently reminded her, "I'm from out of town." You know, a gaming town? People not from here? Anyway, La Strada was out definitively, so I Yelped Italian, Reno, and found Mario's Portofino Ristorante Italiano, which had great reviews. Thursday, Reno had become suddenly busy (dead Mon - Wed) and so I called to see if they were crowded, and did I need a reservation as it was 8pm.
"No, no..." a kind voice laughed. "It's a strangely slow night, come on down. We'd love to have you!" It was inviting, and the joint turned out to be right next to Zephyr Books (which is next to Bangkok Thai), which made it feel like synchronicity of a sorts. Out front, a couple was sitting at a table outside on this sort of covered patio/vestibule built there, in the parking lot, and she was standing over him, sticking an angry finger in his face and looking like she was about to skin him alive, and saying "Never, ever treat a women like that again," but it seemed like she was just dramatically telling a story - maybe it was real, I don't know. I went in.
The place was empty. They all greeted me - the hostess, the waitress, the guy behind the bar who recognized me from the phone call - and apologized that it was so empty. I was eating alone so what did it matter, I shrugged. It was fine. The waitress brought me my wine, helped me decide (manicotti? cannelloni?) to order the shrimp ravioli pescatore with Grand Mariner citrus reduction (who can no to that?), and brought me the cream of artichoke soup, which was a house speciality I'd read about; try the special when you can, I always say.
Now, I had my New Yorker, and I was reading this incredibly thought-provoking article by Lauren Collins, about the artist 36-year-old Tito Sehgal (lives in Berlin, born in Pakistan to an Indian father and German mother), who I had never heard of but immediately liked. Please take a moment to look him up, because I will never do him (nor the article) justice in this already-long blog entry, but in short, he does these live pieces (NOT performance art, for it is others that perform his work) which are hard to describe. Here's an example from Wikipedia that will give you the idea:
"In Sehgal's 2010 work 'This Progress' at the Guggenheim Museum, the artist empties the famed spiral gallery of all art work. The museum visitor is met at the base of the spiral by a child, who asks a small group what they think progress is. As they begin their ascent up the spiral ramp the visitors continue their conversation until they are met by a high school student who picks up the conversation. Further still, they are met by a young adult and lastly an older adult who finishes their ascent to the upper-most point in the Guggenheim."
He gets "interpreters" to work his pieces, normal people from all walks of life who tend to be intellectual and educated, and could use some extra cash. In the one going on right now at the famously large Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, there are 70 storytellers, and the entire work is simply the visitors encountering these storytellers, who do all sorts of things like spontaneously sing or move in unison, but also engage visitors in conversation to, according to the New Yorker article, "discuss moments when they had experienced either a sense of arrival, a sense of belonging, a sense of satisfaction, or a sense of dissatisfaction with themselves."
Crazy, wonderful stuff. Sehgal is very artist-y in other ways that could be seen as pretentious but I like: he doesn't fly, but instead sails when he needs to visit the U.S. He refuses to allow any physical representation of his work, written or otherwise - no catalogue, video, pictures. No written instructions even. And when he sells a work (which he has, in the $100,000's at least), there is no contract. He basically sells an IDEA. He has witnesses who verbally stipulate the rules surrounding the purchase, the future performances which is what they are buying (basically, the right to give the same set of verbal instructions to a number of people on what to do, where, when, etc). And the rules are specific - Tito or his representative must be involved in it, the piece must run for six weeks; even the guards who participate must be given such and such pay in addition to their regular pay, so they would know they were part of the art, and therefore take it seriously.
I love this guy, I thought. I get this - I see the possibilities, and it opened up my imagination wide. Then I got upset I didn't already think of it. Tito beat me to it, and what's worse, maybe I would never had thought of it. I was sitting there, eating my excellent shrimp ravioli with Grand Mariner reduction, and reading about Tito who was simultaneously blowing and reading my mind.
The restaurant was indeed totally empty, and the radio station they had on had been playing a long set of Frank Sinatra, which in this obviously old school Italian restaurant was more than fitting - it was not cliche but classic, mostly because they were playing Sinatra I didn't recognize. I was getting into this mood, of pensive, self-possessed thoughtful longing, with a little melancholy or nostalgia thrown in. I'd had this relationship kerfuffle I was fretting over, and now no one was in this supposedly popular Italian restaurant, and Frank was really singing with heart and soul, and sadness and hope ("Michael and Peter" was the specific song).
And the story of this artist was really moving me. I was having some sort of reaction to it - the reaction we all hope we have when encountering art, which is expanding, learning, exploring. I was thinking of this terrific woman I'd met at the training who was just someone I was instantly simpatico with, and then all he troubles the group was having NOT meshing and gelling, and then I began to think of the whole world, and how it does, or does not, mesh or gel, and how it's important to mesh, to connect. I was full of Appreciative Inquiry and creative possibility and white wine, and then I came to the end of the article, which I am going to reproduce in its entirety because the writing was quite perfect and it was part of what was to become my Perfect Moment.
The reporter/author was describing watching the "These Associations" on opening day from the pedestrian bridge that crosses over Turbine Hall, with the other gawkers. And s/he says:
"Just after noon, the crowd below began to move as a swarm. Like birds on the wind, the interpreters cut vectors across the museum's floor. Once in a while, as though the flock had hit a patch of turbulence, someone would veer off and coast on a different current. From the bridge, I watched a middle-aged man in a blue short-sleeved shirt and his companion, a sensible-looking woman with a leopard-print carry all, trying to pick their way through the scrum. They bobbed and hesitated, progressed a few steps and pulled back. They were rickshaws, trying to cross the world's most bewildering intersection. Finally, they gave up. The man took the woman's hand, touched it to his shoulder, and led her in a waltz."
Oh my.
Besides the fact that pretty much my favorite gesture and action in the world is the moment of taking the woman and starting to waltz, the very fact - the very fact that a man, a generic man, an extra I will never know, just some man who could be and is in fact any and every man - the moment of someone doing that, just giving up and over to the art, giving into the dance. It was such a beautiful moment, I could not help the tears that sprang to my eyes. The Sinatra, the week of tedious training on what was actually a life-affirming topic, the new friend(s), the funny ups and downs of gambling and the behavior of people who play roulette, the kerfuffle, the brave way I faced the kerfuffle, the strengths I was finding inside of me, my past, my present, my future and this really quite good pasta dish - it was all there, somehow, in that moment of human possibility, and in that moment of human possibility was all other moments of human possibility, and there I suddenly found myself: in the middle of an infinite field of grace.
The waitress came up. How is everything? What was I to say? My new training as well as my instincts (which I try to give into, but you know, they are against the norm so I hold them back sometimes) were telling me, I should somehow to try describe what just happened to this waitress here. I did my best to quickly tell her the story - out of town, here for the week, this Sinatra song, the artist (I summarized his work, his flavor as best I could), and the moment of the waltz.
Oh, but I am a cynic, she said. Do people really do that? Are we really like that? Yes, I said, I think so - the moment of abandon and trust and beauty, people are indeed capable of that. Maybe, she considered - maybe they are. Maybe life is, can be beautiful.
Well, we didn't say it like that; I can never remember dialogue, and I'm rusty at writing it. You get the idea: she got the idea. We exchanged whatever words or psychic thoughts or facial expressions or emotional empathy to get the idea across, from me to her, of hope, of possibility, of being more than you think you are. Luminous beings are we, waltzing, not this crude matter. Something of this, she understood.
She told me her name (Morgan); she hugged me, she said I made her night. No, you don't know, she said. There's stuff going on...you don't know that this really did make my night, just saying what you said. I sensed something had happened; unlike so many interactions, it wasn't like there was no there there; in fact, it was all there.
I paid my bill, gathered my things, and as I headed out the same crew that greeted me now gave me a warm goodbye. They apologized again that it had been such a quiet, empty night. It was fine, I said, waving, and as I slipped out, I overheard Morgan say to them, "It really was fine. Don't worry, she made her own moment."
That is the thing about a Perfect Moment: you get a lot more of them when you discover that they are both made and allowed. Created and arising, like Tito reading and blowing my mind. Perfect Moments happen when you are ready, aware and open to them. This was just one of them. May you have one soon. That's all.
No comments:
Post a Comment