Alastair Creamer reports on the World Wide Wander, which took place earlier this month…
The World Wide Wander took place on Friday 18th September with wanderings happening from Melbourne to Portland, Oregon. There was a Street Wisdom walk as part of this in Tunbridge Wells, close to me, so I decided to go along after a big nudge from Martin Lee (“you must do this”).
Street Wisdom is a Walkshop, a creative practice you use as you walk. It falls into 3 parts. First, you Tune Up, then you consider your Quest. Finally, you Share what you’ve unlocked and discovered. It takes 90mins and there’s a good chance something unexpected might happen in that time. People say it’s life-changing. It was for me.
The Tune Up is a climatisation. We walked the same street three times, on our own, and on each occasion we were given a different lens through which to sense and appreciate our surroundings: look at it as a child would, fascinated in one thing after another (Wow. Oh, wow!); slow your breathing and walking pace right down – what do you see now; finally, sense the beauty in everything around you. We took different routes each time, lasting 10mins. This was a cleansing of the palette, a cleaning of the slate.
For the Quest, we were invited to think about a question, personal or professional, that’s lying at the back of our mind. It might be a challenge, an opportunity, a conundrum. I had mine ready. We had 30mins to walk another part of the street, asking it questions and listening for answers. And this is where the magic happened.
First, the things I remember as I walked: a man sitting on the street saying to anyone who would listen, “You have to laugh more”. I kept coming across specialist shops – an Italian Deli, a gardening shop, a rare book stall. A shop front had the title, ‘Beautiful Things for Fabulous People’ but it was empty. I saw a sign in a side street, ‘Hidden’ (it was a hairdressers). I overheard a fragment of conversation, “… but it was entirely amicable”. These, and many other things took residence in my mind.
I realised halfway round my walk that another question was slowly nudging itself to the front, politely asking the original question if it could jump the queue. I had thought I was thinking about should I retire, is this the moment? What emerged was the exact opposite – should I re-launch Eyes Wide Opened (EWO), a passion project I had created in 2012 to support young graduates in their transition from education into work. We had paused it during the Pandemic and never found the time and energy to re-start it.
We sat down over a cup of tea and shared our experiences. That was an important moment to acknowledge the emergence of this other question, to say it out loud: “How can I put this, I’m not ready to retire!”
And that was it. We were told that we’d keep mulling over our Quest for several days. But something shifted on that walk. I can’t point to any one thing and link it back to the flipping of the question. I’m going to have to go on another Street Wisdom walk and ask a different question.
– Alastair Creamer