SOMETHING YOU LOVE
A different kind of bouquet. To inspire and uplift.
At a recent THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS IN PUBS (TEiP) event, someone on my table said:
“This is the best book I’ve ever read”.
The rest of us leaned in a little further and paid closer attention.
The person told us about a book they’d read, years ago, and how it had changed their life.
The moment stuck in my mind, and I found myself mulling it over in the following days.
It felt special for a few reasons:
The person who shared was offering us the fruit of all their reading. In a time where we have access to unprecedented amounts of information, curation and filtering are extremely valuable. It felt like a privilege to hear about their favourite book, to benefit from the time they’d taken to absorb a lot of information. To be given their pick of the crop.
It also felt intimate: a favourite anything is personal. To be unguarded and generous with a personal detail is like opening a door to a truer part of oneself, a part that most people don’t usually get within the first 20 minutes of a group conversation in a busy pub. It encouraged us co-conversationalists to do the same, deepening our discussion and leaving us with a sense of having got to know each other quite quickly.
The final effect of this person’s share was to uplift us. Understandably given the inevitable challenges of life and negative bent to the news, many conversations focus on struggle and difficulty. But this was a pure positive. An enthusiastic appreciation for something the person loved. It was refreshing and en-lightening. It made things lighter.
And this is all without even reading the book!
Moments like these often occur at TEiP, but they’re still gems.
They happen infrequently enough to feel special. I felt lucky that I’d been at that table on that day for that little moment. It inspired me to think about how to create more moments like these.
I began to envision a meetup with this kind of sharing as the whole point:
An occasion where people would have the opportunity to share something they love and to hear what other people love before any small talk.
SOMETHING YOU LOVE will be a special, one off event (unless you love it enough to ask for more).
It will follow a similar format to TEiP: small groups of 3-4 people, 20-25 minute rounds, shuffling groups between each round. But instead of discussing thought experiments, you’ll be invited to talk about something you love and listen to other people’s shares. I will mark time with a meditation bell every 5 minutes so that time can be shared fairly. As ever, there will be no pressure to share if you’d prefer to just listen. Everyone loves a good listener.
I like letting people be creative in their interpretations of prompts (hence the very laid back nature of TEiP), so this event will not restrict us to a particular variety of ‘something’.
I’m imagining one person talking about their favourite café, someone else sharing a memory of a walk they did with an epic view, another recounting the moment they found a creative flow, another talking about a person they love, etc.
This is an experiment.
It could be that my invitation is too vague. Perhaps people would prefer more focus for their shares. I can imagine genre-specific editions of this event, for example:
SOMETHING YOU LOVE: MUSIC
SOMETHING YOU LOVE: BOOKS
SOMETHING YOU LOVE: PLACES
I will conduct a vote at the end of this special event to find out. But for now, expect to receive a motley assembly of ‘loves’. A bouquet that has nothing to do with Valentines Day.
I hope you can join us on the 23rd of February at the beautiful Betjeman Arms in St Pancras Station for:
And regardless of whether you can join us, it would be great to hear your thoughts on this experiment, so please do get in touch/comment below if you have ideas about it.
I’ll write an update on how it went afterwards, which you can receive by subscribing here:
Bonny