Travel funnies 2014 – Dordogne and Bordeaux, France

Torrey Orton

June 21, 2014

 

What’s a brand, really?

 

Arriving on the outskirts of the greatest by price/volume wine region in the world - Bordeaux, and specifically St Emilion - I realised that this is what ‘brand’ means. Anything which can have the brand attached legitimately to it has value, no matter what the scale. The scale can mean a few hundred square meters here and there along the road between houses, or, in towns, spaces which elsewhere would be an undeveloped vacant lot or a sign of local decline, here have vines of manicured looks. They are there because they are Bordeaux vines, and some Grand Cru to boot.

 

Think acquiring the brand of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by taking an address in Cambridge (Mass. that is!) for your start-up private tertiary education establishment. There’s an MIT simulacra in Melbourne, branded MIT. This does work for foreigners needing only a brand label to attach to job apps for positions in countries and companies where Cambridge is as common as Villeneuve or Maisonneuf are in France – namely, every town has one of each of these nearby. But everyone knows they are a place name and not a quality drop, whereas the title ‘MIT’ has recognition value way beyond its place in the daily experience of people in, say, Sri Lanka. You won’t get the branded MIT experience or learning in the simulacra, either.

 

Road works, again…

 

I’ve long been a fan of those “Rough Surface” signs all around Melbourne, often signalling to no obvious effect. That is, attending to the expected distortion of our travel experience yields a nil result. The ‘rough’ fails to put in a perceptible appearance. So, too, in France there’s a nanny state competition already mentioned re: limbs and rocks that may fall. In addition there’s the competing duo of “Chaussees deformees” and “Trous en formation”, which roughly mean there’s a bump ahead whose origin may either be lack of attention to weather effects (the said “trous” arising from freezing subsurface water in winter which creates surface bubbles that break down into holes as things warm up) or be a direct effect of intentional deformation of the road surface to improve it. I particularly like the implication that the trous are the result of some naturally productive (en formation) process, while the rough surface of the “Chaussees deformees” are the real effect of efforts to improve things? Nice one.

 

Then there was Freud again…

 

We were being lined up by a waiter for ordering from a flash menu, when he questioned our respective holdings of allergies, since many local, wholly bio and only slightly distressed by preparation treatments (cooking) components were included in the offerings and …suddenly, he was hit with an attack of the sneezes in a setting (overlooking St Emilion township from a roof top terrace) he’s been working for the last weeks with no clear sources for sneezes in the environment…I fell about laughing which he joined easily, but somewhat less fully than my giving over to the moment…BTW, none of us could come up with an allergy to warn the chef about.

 

Jardins for a moment…

 

…we’ve seen a few in the last few days. About four close up in varying degrees of intensity ranging from the very slight Jardins de Sardy in the back blocks 15 ks. east of St Emilion to the extremely rigorous, classical French style a few days before. The others had tended towards the classical with variations for scale, age, and rehabilitation from original plantings and so on. All had an age of a couple of hundred years as a starting place.

 

What struck me viewing the Jardins de Sardy – a somewhat cobbled together anglo-italian melange, with water features of substance and ingenuity, but altogether only about ten hectares of coverage before folding naturally into pasturage - was how embracing the presentation was, containing many specimens of flowering and towering and climbing and crawling vegetation, any one of which might reach out to attract my attention (noticed because this is what was happening at the time). A low demand and high opportunity experience.

 

What we had faced at Eyrignac Manor Garden at Salignac- Eyvigues, Perigord (Dordogne valley) was the reverse: high visual demand and little choice opportunity except to turn away from the demand. The unrelieved designed views required visual submission through their very consistency, formality and persistence in the visual space of the present moment. Most powerfully this effect was achieved by their justifiably acclaimed hornbeam based planting, rigorously sculpted over a hectare or so, with maintenance requirements of monthly hand clippings of 42,000 square meters of shaped facades as the display placards announced with equally imposing formality and precision.

 

What it’s all about is the unnatural, of course, I just realised in a noddingly reflective moment. Plants don’t grow in regular, clipped forms except under duress. So my amazed shock at the achievements of classical topiary is expressing a perceived impossible forced into its boundaries but unremitting human attention…that which only can be supplied by wealth.

 

There is something off-putting in this visual demand which is perhaps somewhat the experience I was having in Paris a few weeks ago. Where everything is designed, everything is predictable and so, intrinsically boring, or reassuring if you have that feeling arise from certainty. I obviously tend to the former, increased by my inclination to see things slightly from a skewed perspective in order to bring peripheral vision to bear on my world… the vision which is highly geared to threats, disturbances, in brief to pre-empting the unexpected.

 

And here comes Freud again, again…

 

Often, if someone is lecturing me about something (which I accept by remaining present to the lecture, or may have requested it in the first place), I will attend to it by not appearing to listen, by letting it flow by, especially if the information novelty is high. With the gardens of more natural pretence, I look at them as I do a forest or a mountain range – a surveying, sweeping look at the whole, seeking the whole? I don’t know, but the perceptual effort seems on the edge of the unconscious and cannot be forced. It can only be allowed, which requires not trying to see, in a way. This is of a kind with insight, intuition, problem-solving…which just comes and cannot be forced.

 

And so, it is not surprising that I only noticed the gazpacho on the menu board of the fourth restaurant we checked out last night, having been disappointed two nights before by its allure on another establishment’s hoarding which we were then denied, once having chosen to eat there on the basis of that allure, by the sad message that it was off, not on at all. I didn’t even know I was looking for it this time and there it was and it was on and it was good, though not a gazpacho we had ever had before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Travel funnies 2014 – Le Mont-Dore, Massif Central, Auvergne, France

Torrey Orton

June 13, 2014

The cuckoo and the cow bell called to us…

Travel funnies* – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Le Mont-Dore in the Massif Central of the Auvergne, where rises the Dordogne River in the Puy de Sancy. We were here for the first time in 1993, so the return is long awaited, though not consciously so over the intervening years before our deciding this revisit.

 

The cuckoo and the cowbell called to us as we were climbing through the forest which clothes the steep slope of the Capuchin at the end of the funicular ride from Mont-Dore to its foot around 1200 metres up…a slightest semblance of the cuckoo which I thought at first was my wishing it to be there as it had been 20 years ago when I heard the first cuckoo in my life in this place. As is often so, I did not then recognise that what it was, was it: a cuckoo. By the time we had emerged from the forested rise at the tree line, the cuckoo was undeniably itself, not my aural phantasm.

The cow bell on the other hand was a decidedly unproven reality and remained agreed so between us until we started our return an hour later. At which point some 100 metres back down the path, I heard the plangent ping of the Reine de la Troupeau, at first a solo note and then the burst of them which means the Reine is moving and munching at the same time. She can sound like a herd when in high move and munch mode. Apart from the joy of a tone recovered, there was the reassurance that not all location has been subsumed by GPS plugins to every being with a bloodstream**.

And the violas and strawberries flowered at us

Being early summer, many of the trees were still just coming into leaf and the earliest ground flowers were about in abandon. I had forgotten strawberries, the wild ones which give the cultivated types we’re accustomed to their deserved repute mostly experienced in its absence in the Coles or Casino pretenders. Jane pointed them out in the midst of other small-flowered upland delicates. Way too early for consumption…and I’m wondering that I forgot them as an opportunity of this trip, which of course they cannot be because the season is too late or dry or something.

I noticed today on another hillside that I have much too good an eye for the small virtues of nature – the obscure bloom or unexpected one in a certain microclimate – to have never cared for bucolic poetry or music, though as I thought it I remembered that there’s a particular poem about the humble bumblebee whose provenance I cannot recall yet it is with me in some vaguely accessible memory recess…strange ways, the mind. A 19^th century English poet? But then, I didn’t know what poetry was verbal music) until I read Gerard Manley Hopkins aged around 20 as an undergraduate. No teacher bothered to mention it. Since when was iambic pentameter music??? Any more than the number one was a convenient fiction of mathematics?

 And a field of daffodils…

…filled the plain of the grassed slopes the cows were yet to munch…striking little natural daffs more delicate than the garden prepared varieties I’m used to at home, yet still briefly, leading me to wonder aloud where the peasants went who had set them out so numerously and successfully as city workers had been doing in soaring numbers in the grounds of Versailles a week ago…leaving trails of little forcing boxes around the place. Nature beats a worker most times in the beauty game.

But the hotel room engineering has a weird hanging space…

At last a traditional funny! The Hotel du Parc in Mont Dore has been recently renovated to good effect, leading the space to bed ratio and bath room swinging a wet towel ratio to desirable levels, but as seen elsewhere in French renovations there’s a glitch. There’s a built-in robe with a foot’s worth of long hanging space – enough for three shirts, a jacket or so and a couple of trousers.

 Now someone created a short-drop hanging space good for hanging pressed shirts and similar, but not trousers or long skirts; neck to belly hanging space. However, whoever did the measures on this had early adolescent sizing in mind, if anything, and so a serious shortage of adult hanging space. I suspect it wasn’t even measured other than to divide the space equally into four levels for some reason of construction simplicity rather than customer need fulfilment. Well, it obviously met the needs of the hotel chain purchasing division’s need for the renovation at best price or whatever, but the end-user?

And the shower starts in reverse…

Discovering new ways to mix cold and warm water in taps is probably one of the most useless endeavours of the plumbing engineer fraternity and here we had another variant which stumped us for 15 minutes. Intuitive it wasn’t. We couldn’t get anything from it for a while, not merely just cold or hot. Once in hand, it was obvious as the newly disclosed often is, but also purposeless. What’s the added value, as the econometricians like to wonder?

 Expectations and experience revisited…

As in Paris, Mont-Dore started out a slight disappointment for me, it never having a hope of measuring up to Alps or Pyrenees, its top most reach being the mere 1889 metres of the Puy de Sancy. But as the days have rolled by and we’ve patrolled the region with persistence the pleasures of very long views over totally green landscapes, rolling up and down many hundreds of metres never failed the danger of repetition …rather gained from it as the same sights were viewed from many perspectives and in many lights, occasionally seasoned by the soft shadows of emerging thunderheads (which threatened but never performed up to their promise, fortunately.)

And we drank about four different local wines we’d never heard of (wines of Auvergne, huh?). Between our traditional port-a-bottle approach to walking lunches for years in Europe and numerous dinners, we never had a bad one and always had viable ones for about 15 Euro or less across the selections, backed by true local delicacies in the sausage and cheese domains supported by bread of reliable consistency.

 The black shower and wash basin material

Not at all funny – amazing! It wasn’t until my third shower that I realised the slightly soft, ambient temperature-neutral material under me was also totally slip proof … as good as slip proof boat shoes of which I have a couple pair. At my age a slip is as good as a broken something which may take months to recover from. Thanks water proof room engineers. I may refloor a bathroom for safety’s sake.

*I am realising that the purpose of Funnies is to describe various arising realities in my life in concrete ways that render them truly for me and maybe so for others. Enjoy, as our culture challenges us to do.

 

**It just occurs to me that probably I can be tracked by my pacemaker if I’m in the right company. I know I can feel its speed up response to an electromagnetic source too near to its hiding place in my shoulder.

Travel funnies 2014 - Paris

Torrey Orton

June 8, 2014

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange, unusual, as is Paris which I am visiting for the first time in 5 years or so and with the advance knowledge of recovering 100 pgs. of stuff I wrote in 1972 during the last four months of our 16 month tenure here.

However this expectation was skewered by a repeat of the Charles De Gaulle airport record holding performance in the race for slowest luggage delivery in most incompetently designed baggage carousel. They didn’t get as high as the previous 1 hour wait 15 years ago, but it was 45 minutes including trying to get through the crowd squeezed in by two carousels opposing each other across a 50 metre space handling 450 folks off the full A380 we had arrived on from Dubai.

This had been preceded by a definitely record breaking taxi of 29 minutes from touch down to arrival gate, none of which was spent waiting for others to get out of the way as happens at JFK in New York with regularity. We had the Grand Tour of the airport as far as I could tell…all over the place to get to the arrival from what appeared to be behind it!

Dog drenching disgrace

One of these historical knowledges was the great Parisian dog drenching disgrace. To quote a 41 year old perception:

“Where else in the world can a dog piss on so much history with so little effort? Paris - a city of great stone losing its nature under the impact of innumerable streams of piss. Paris – the animals’ pissing post. Paris – city of sidewalks paved in dog shit….Impression of a city with an unending wealth of little yellow springs …”

So I walked up (from the Seine) to our old stamping grounds in 117, Rue du Cherche Midi this morning (June 2) and found the sidewalks paved in old dog turds with a sprinkling of recent contributions and drying rivulets of piss running off the 17^th to 19^th century 6 story apartment buildings, much as 40 years ago. Pleasantly enough I tried a local croissant just from the oven and found it typical of the genre in the best sense of both words. And our old café – Le Chien Qui Fume – was still there on the corner of the Boulevard de Montparnasse and Cherche Midi but the neighbouring once best patisserie (“artisanale” variety) has declined into banality. On the other hand, much of the length of the Cherche Midi has been transformed into high end boutiques, in no obvious way impeded by the dog doings, and nor contributing to their cleaning up. The same is the case at Versailles and the more pretentious reaches of the Boulevard St. Germain, of which more later.

Aux Deux Garcons

Last night we revisited a favoured eatery known until recently as Aux Fins Gourmets. This was our favourite not-famous Parisian eatery from back in the days when a Fr750/month salary was totally consumed by rent (6^th floor walk-up at Cherche Midi glorified by having both a loo and shower within).  Much later that year (’72) we discovered that 750Fr was the legislated salary for all foreign contract teachers at the time, which just happened to be the salary of the lowest paid workers on the Renault production line with the marvellously spun name of ouvriers specialise.

 The other Fr 750, provided by whoever was not paying the rent, was eats, cigs, papers and the occasional trip to Chez Hamadi for grilled chops and polenta at about 6.5Fr a head. Aux Fins Gourmets brought us into stratospheric reaches of 25+Euro dishes and similar priced wine (for balance’s sake, the wine we regularly drank was max. 2.5 Fr at which rate you just got a miniscule vdqs notification, and a glass bottle (or was that VOC – vin d’origine controlee? It’s been a while.). Doing this review reminds me that one of the skills in those days for drinkers of local plonk was to check for the notification of Algerian wine being used to get more mileage out of French labels (focussed on the 1Fr a litre wine market which was sustained by workers’ 1 litre a day, mostly at lunch, wine consumption in plastic bottles, so claimed an article in Le Nouvel Observateur at the time).

The Garcons of the name did a good job, but didn’t have cassoulet on - wrong season! Nor the remarkable collection of 50plus year old Armagnacs, each hand bottled, etc. Nor the overall uppermid priceyness of the precursors…which allowed an investment in a very credible Graves of recent vintage.

 Homeless Paris

Café Flore and Les Deux Magots, two of the flashiest coffee spots on the Boulevard Saint Germain were home to a homeless family (mum, dad and at least two kids, looking pre-school ) sleeping up against the Flore street awnings still at 6:45am when I walked by looking for a quiet side street to conduct some phone business with home. A small variety of clochards were wandering around my walk path the next day, leavened by a guy my age making way on a child’s mini-scooter. Not something I’ve seen in Melbourne.

 Paris unknown, and yet not

We both noticed in the first three days here that it looks and feels different from ever before and that this was an effect of the great French uniformity, the Napoleonic achievement of integrating the late medieval with the 19th century and a set of regulations which have kept the proportions that way (6 stories, etc.) and the facades indistinguishable, mostly. This ruler over every structure is then amplified by the sandy colour of the local stone and concrete look-a-likes. We have a fourth floor view up the Rue Des Saints Peres which displays the look-a-likeness of this area and contrasts it with one of the glaring modernist events of the last hundred years in old Paris – the Tour Montparnasse in its grey, near blackness of 50+ stories on the horizon, overwhelming in its confirmation that the anything at a right price part of capitalism doesn’t always win. Montparnasse is a show off. This uniformity occurs in every town of any historical substance which is part of the greatness of the country. Go anywhere and see Paris in miniature.

 I’ll take the historical over the modernist most days, but for once I am appreciating that the historical was often a bit colourless. Unless, you were among the great Louisian kings who produced the wondrous Versailles over a few hundred years and went bananas for colour on the interiors, at least the regal ones. Reminded me more of a baroque cathedral but for the bed rooms. Not a presentation I’ve ever liked but the expense is commanding.

 

How’s your day been…

There we were at door opening time (10am sharp) of Sephora on the Champs Elysees accompanied by 5 minutes of clapping and twerking or something to a noisy piece of pop by all the staff (around 25 I’d guess). After 5 minutes to find a particular brand of perfume we ambled up to the cashier, presented the item and as the cashier was turning on all systems I heard “How’s your day been…” in French, which I roughly understood, though not quickly enough not to be taken for foreign. As I seldom am, I was struck dumb that for all their linguistic preciousness (not an unworthy pre-occupation), cash and brand had deprived the staff of their standard French manners and replaced them with the faux intimacy of the Anglo world. I want to say “pathetic” but I so often encounter occasions when that seems appropriate I’m no longer sure of expressing anything by it other than my own irritated wonder.

 

Limbs may fall and such

Another piece of formulaic public language is that of warnings against this or that danger – usually the stuff of which a lawsuit can be made, or has been often enough to warrant the printing required to pre-empt suits of not warning, etc. I was ambling along Boulevard St Germain this morning before the Sephora incident and came by a miniscule public park planted next to the church St. Germain des Pres with a historical notification of its relatively recent origin in the work of an architect you won’t have known. A few metres along from the placard came another warning as follows: “In case of storm this garden will be closed” roughly translated, do not stay in this park if there is a storm but we aren’t exactly saying that. Immediately I was connected with two of my Australian favourites of the genre – “Limbs may fall” and “Overhanging limbs”– to be found on country roads carrying the unaware to notable destinations like Wilson’s Prom. At St Severin a version of the ‘overhanging limbs’ one popped up and it was hard to see the danger, as is usually the case in Oz, too.

 

Travel funnies 2014 - Dubai

Torrey Orton

June 1, 2014

Travel funnies – where everything is of interest that can be a bit strange,…this time, weapons out of kitchen utensils

Just a day and a bit pausing here in the midst of so much on the edge of nothing sustained by its paleo-historic treasure of convertible carbons…a place remarkable for its greyness leavened by occasional pastels in typically European 6 story accommodations radiating around two high-rise centres – nominally east and west Dubai, the home of the kilometric Burg Khalifa.

Around the Hyatt where we’ve stopped a second time, the evidence of the encroaching of the Gulf by piles of sand behind various bunkering techniques continues in the creating canals and lagoons for vacation housing. Here, for the unaccountably numerous time, my trekking back pack carried as luggage not carryon, with its contents of various life assisting (first-aid kits, bug defender, eating tools, wet weather stuff) goodies passed through all screening devices without even a squeak of concern in dozens of countries include this one was found to be holding a questionable item by a last gasp check after clearing customs and about to grab a gab. There was something in it (it being inside a large roll around suitcase). After opening the case and finding nothing but an electric razor in a case that might have held a snub-nosed 38 in a  cartoon and pressing on into the backpack to find a camping knife (Swiss Army multi-function type, but no projectile sending capacities of note), I pointed out there was another such scabbarded knife, too, in the mess that is the contents of the pack.

The customs lady opened it and found a beautiful scrimshaw knife of razor sharpness and about 6cm (3 inches?) length with a safety lock once opened to protect unskilled fingers from self-execution in the conduct of serious camping endeavours (which for us amount to cutting quality sausage on the highest ridge we can reach on our daily climbing in France). I had a moments’ sharp despair that this would be confiscated as a half dozen forgotten pen knives have been on passing screenings in Australia. This one, however, is a 25 year old gift from a long-term Chinese friend for some consideration long forgotten but for the gift. My despair was dismissed by a 1 second judgement of the head screener that my weapon was no such thing.

All this took three minutes… and I walked away as full-handed as when I arrived, armed for this season’s sausage, bread and wine after an adventure unexpected for a result unforeseeable as it all was in the eyes of the beholder looking at an x-ray screen with new perspectives unshared even by her co-workers. Imagine what does get through, as the Australian Senator for farming matters and moral righteousness, Bill Heffernan, recently dramatized at Parliament with his pipe bomb infiltration of the high house’s security, perhaps forewarning of future intent of his own since he sees it so much in the minds of others around him!!    

Learner therapist (44)…… A first session strategy

Torrey Orton

May 28, 2014

Making contact – aims and methods of the first therapy session

My objectives in Session One: to provide my patients with …

…experience of recognition and acceptance                                                                             

…increased understanding of presenting issue(s)

…hope that change is possible and that some directions towards it exist

…relief of pressure(s) by live exposure and containment of them

…a live model of the therapy experience which will follow

…an appreciation of their existing competences relevant to handling presenting issue(s)

…a sense of personal wholeness

Stages in Session One (and most others) – a collection of conscious processes

Coming into our ‘house ‘– arrival ritual(s)

·         Arriving, paying, waiting, being called up

·         Hello’s, handshakes, seating, name checking?

Opening

·         Blank slate assumption – getting them to start ASAP (prompted by questions like What are you here for? What do you need? What can I do for you? if necessary)

·         Listening for key players, key feeling(s), key theme(s)

·         Initial validations - ‘Noticing’ feelings, themes and players; remarking these as they emerge.

• Initial feedback – summaries of story chunks for disconfirmation, capturing themes, feelings and players; relevant therapist self-disclosure(s).

Engagement - Joining their story

·         Perspectives – framing their story, similar stories, psych facts conceptualising the ‘problem’

·         Implications – extending their story – how it affects whole life?

·         Objectives – what outcomes wanted; sharpen the focus

·         Work processes – through feelings to truths and new actions, as we are doing here now

·         “Am I crazy?” – a common question to be grasped directly as early as possible.

Closing

·         Summary of overall session tone, topics and tendencies

·         Check fit of my style with their needs

·         Therapeutic prediction – time and labour to ‘recovery’

·         Home works

Leaving our ‘house’ – departure ritual(s)

·         Walk to gate

·         Encouraging word(s)

·         Handshake

·          C u next week…

(Some of) my therapeutic assumptions…

·         Feeling is the pathway to resolutions

·         The pathway to feeling is non-verbal, assisted by feeling language and concrete expression

·         Resolution requires acceptance of the injured self

·         Skills for resolution are mostly present in non-injured self, but inaccessible to the injured at the moment

·         Change emerges from the unconscious and reveals itself in little steps of which a first is starting therapy

·         Many issues arise from misshapen or over-developed life habits based on normal functions and needs.

·         Awareness is the key tool for shifting ineffective habits

·         Getting back own power and defending against others’ power is usually a major covert outcome in depression /anxiety spectrum disorders

·         Our times are net stressors for everyone

·         Sharing secrets w/ significant others reduces internal stressors

·         Families matter cultures matter gender matters age/life-stage matters…

·         Therapeutic progress must occur at thought, feeling and action levels to be resilient and resistant to backsliding.

 

 

What’s normal now (6)…we are the worlds of our hosted bugs

Torrey Orton

May 25, 2014

 

Levels of life in fact …

 

Recently SBS TV hosted a series on the bugs upon and within us. We provide them with a living and they provide us with life. The uncounted hordes cleaning up our exterior are exceeded in number and diversity by those inside which give tangible meaning to a ‘gut feel’. Even knowing they are there vigorously gathering away does not give access to any perception of their presence in their reality – invisible and intangible things to us which yet succeed in comforting us, or not. We just have to believe they are so until we get a look though a scanning microscope at the myriad creeping and crawling things polishing our armour (skin) and processing our roughage (digestion).

We and they are all alive for a while, but only aware of each other in moments of failure to provide our respective services to each other, such as the result of an unintended injury like an antibiotic attack on a germ which defaults indiscriminately to all bugs and disables digestion in one way or another. However, our communication is indirect, by gesture as it were – ‘I’m sick to my stomach with…’ or, ‘It was a gut wrenching experience…’ from the inner residents to the host and ‘Here’s something soothing for that diarrhoea...’ from the host to the residents. Both are well within reach of the others’ sensibilities, but almost without regard for each other except in an emotional storm driven by objective threats to viability – menaces of death of various kinds.

… and perception

When the bugs’ world is distorted by ours, we, for those moments, are focussed by their collective distress away from our concerns, taking up theirs as if they are ours – which they are, so to speak, but we cannot conduct a life at the microscopic level. When we do so by force of disease we are heading for the doorways of perception’s close. That’s how a serious gastro-enteric stomach bug feels, as it literally lays waste with us.

So, too, do we dally with the brain’s presence to us: we kiss lips, not neuronal networks. If the networks are distorted by injuries physical (blunt force trauma; natural declines of genetic weakness or ageing) or emotional (disregard, deprivation, and the ensuing despairs of our oppression over time), our self in its physical guise is compromised. But it is unhelpful to our management of that compromise to point out its brainy compositions. What do we expect anyone to do with that observation themselves? Well, they can affect their sense of self by a variety of means – meditation, walking, eating right, sleeping OK …– those are the levels of action which are known to affect daily well-being directly already.

What’s neuron’s got to do with us – the lip kissing us - except in that facilitative sense which the bugs also are for us? They are different levels of perception and action, like that between Newtonian and quantum physics. We are in the Newtonian world and it is in the quantum.

Learner therapist (45)…… Beating the "BLOCKS"

Torrey Orton

May 23, 2014

Beating the "BLOCKS" *

An icebreaker to bring some unspoken rules above sea-level

Précis

            "Blocks" is a tool for eliciting training group members' apprehensions about the activity they are about to enter. It focuses on expectations which will (in their view!) constrain their participation in the activity.  These, typically, are concerns about the likely attitudes and behaviour of others in the group towards them, with themes of minority difference, power hierarchy, influence of external events/concerns and the like prominent in participant contributions.

            A "Blocks" exercise also serves to legitimate practical Equal Opportunity principles in the process of training. In addition, it provides markers for the group to measure its own gains in process competence during the training experience, in terms of issues it perceived to be important from the start. And, finally it contributes to setting the climate for participation by inviting members to identify the conditions under which it can occur for them now.

            The process has been used with intact work groups, short (1 day) and long (5 day residential) programs, with staff from all levels and specializations.  It has been used as a preface to courses ranging from basic counselling skills, negotiation skills and consultant training to job redesign and collaborative decision-making, in groups from 8 to 100+.

Rationale

The purposes of the exercise are to:

            1- increase the potential for participation of all present;

            2- provide mutually agreed indicators of dysfunctional behaviours;

            3- engage participants from the very start with the fact that the sessions will deal                           in the here-and-now; and,

            4- legitimate discussing normally undiscussable matters of group dynamics which              are central to effective learning in groups.

The "Blocks" Process

Step 1: Having done basic program housekeeping and introductions -

Invite participants to reflect on the kinds of things which are likely to block their participation in the coming activity; suggest they make a few notes about these things. (2 mins.)

Step 2:

Say you are going to give everyone a chance to speak, but no one will be forced to do so. If they don't want to speak they just say 'pass' when their turn comes. It is often worthwhile asking 

Then, record on butcher’s paper all contributions, one at a time, going around the group and taking one from each participant until all are up.  If one says their idea is already there, have them say it anyway, since they often differ significantly in detail. Note duplications by starring, etc. (10-15 mins)

Step 3: (optional)

 If appropriate, add the idea of stigmatizing differences, like those of colour/race, language, national origin, sex, physical or other disability, etc., if these have not arisen naturally. Note that they are the most common level of noticeable difference in groups, and that they are the normal grounds on which majority and minority subgroups informally occur. Add that there is much evidence that being a minority member of a group makes it much harder to participate. (5 mins)

Step 4:

Invite participants to comment on any patterns or features of the "blocks" listed; if appropriate, offer the stigmatizing potential of one's own (the trainer's) characteristics to concretize the issue and bring it into the here-and-now (e.g. - I talk about my unavoidable foreignness - a US accent - and my awareness of how that touches (understandably) some stereotypes). (3-5 mins)

Step 5: (optional)

Challenge them to consider the likely effect of any contribution they make to the group's activities on increasing or decreasing the participation of others in the group. Note that the items cited suggest particular areas for this group to pay attention to (whatever they may be).

            Then, get on with the program.

Outcomes

            The kinds of issues raised in more than 100 applications of this technique include -

1- fear of negative reaction to one's input by others

2- fear of being looked down on for being foreign

3- concern about confidentiality of the activities

4- external thoughts - work pressure outside; pressing personal concerns

5- not being used to sitting in one room all day

6- unsure what this course is about and what I'll gain

7- a perceived physical shortcoming - eg. stuttering

8- fear of not knowing enough to contribute meaningfully

9- feeling intimidated by superiors

10- lacking personal credibility due to a history in the organization as office clown, etc.

11- doing something new is scary

12- not really wanting to be here; 'I'm a don't know why I was sent'.

            As an opener, "Blocks" clearly establishes we are all somewhat apprehensive about what's coming and that it is O.K. to talk about it here. Just saying these things has the effect of reducing the blocking effect of many of them.

 

*Originally published in: Training & Development in Australia

Vol. 17, No.3 September 1990; pg. 39-40

Revised 23/7/1996 and 10/10/2007 by the author