ISSUE 122: WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO TO BRING THINKING BACK TO LIFE?

Issue: What are we going to do to bring thinking back to life?
(Session on Monday morning following up from Saturday and Sunday sessions on ‘The death of thinking’)

Participants: Shonagh, Lee, Alan, Adam, Jen, Kate, Jamie, Annie, Rebecca

- Write to your MP… or become one?
- Make work which is smarter, funnier, more meaningful, better
- Think and feel dispassionately
- Be vigilant and know your values
- Hold dissent
- Encourages our advocates to speak for us
- Talk about immigration (and other thorny issues)
- Be honest when asked to talk (e.g. about the advantages you’ve had)
- Work out where you are on a spectrum of opinion about a topic
- Bring different ways of thinking into our world and take ours out to the wider world
- Go on marches
- Give people time off to go on marches (from work / rehearsals)
- Put 26 March demo in diaries
- Don’t assume shared politics – but have conversations where it’s ok to disagree
- Understand the process of how thinking has been killed – be in the roles of people who have killed thinking
- Be honest with yourself – about your beliefs and work and who it is for
- Use our theatre skills to help people articulate / voice their opinions
- Improvise other people’s POV
- Feel as well as think
- Let thinking be messy
- Don’t cut education budgets in the arts first
- Read Arnold Mindell ‘World Work’ and find out about Cooking Chaos
- Be braver – and worry less about being right
- Learn in life – ask better questions
- Formulate an ideological point of view – read, talk, and think
- Help as well as oppose
- Do battle but with awareness
- Create platforms for speech / thought = and prepare well if you are speaking yourself
- As each other questions
- Put ourselves in positions where we’re not experts
- Change your attitude to what’s happening
- Be on the look out for unspoken-anti-thinking-ism
- Think harder