Paralysis

by ruth barker, 13 May 2009

Hello Ailsa,

thanks! Glad you like the Blog and hopefully our upcoming Collaboration season will provide lots more food for thought (see comment on ‘how to make a chair’ below).
It’s an interesting point you raise about paralysis, and one which I hope may be taken up by some of those who are contributing articles.

You say that you first identified what happens during collaboration with people from other sectors as ‘paralysis’, but then ‘realised it was part of the shift from your usual process.’ I think this is very insightful. It makes me think in terms of physical movement or momentum. When an object is moving in a given direction, for that direction to change it seems like there has to be a point at which the object’s velocity decreases. It looks like the object slows down, or even stops moving altogether for a tiny moment. How can I phrase this better? Perhaps I mean that (and I’m no physicist!) if an object is moving left, then for it to move right there must be a point at which it has ceased to move left but it hasn’t started moving right yet. Something that looks like paralysis might occur at the moment of transition.
Maybe that isn’t what happens to motion at all (like I say, I’ve never been much use at these things), but sometimes it feels as though that’s what happens, and that’s good enough to me. Maybe collaborations can also feel as though they pause creative momentum sometimes. Whether this is true of not, it might be good for us to follow Ailsa’s suggestion that this isn’t paralysis at all, but merely a moment within the changing of directions.
Cheers Ailsa,

more later,
R