Vitae Conference – canoes and canowledge

Fragment of memory: The natives of a small pacific island need to make canoes to fish and trade. They could make a canoe in a few hours, but they don’t.They take several days. They eat, they celebrate, they spin it out. You see, for them. ItS NOT JUST ABOUT THE CANOES.

I have just returned from a canoe making at Wawick University. It was good. I guess I bring back some knowledge, but mainly I met canoe makers, and now I know that I am not alone in my canoe. I have a paddle and I know how to use it. Each paddle stroke has the force of a 100 other paddlers, which is good because at my age my paddle stroke has been weakening, my fingers losing their power to grip.

There is a knowledge overload problem at conferences – loads of new stuff / too little time to process it. And for me, no processing means little remembering. I met some peope at session 1 whom I never saw subsequently – or perhaps I did but did not recognise them. And were the 2 facilitators both pregnant – or was that the way their tops hung over their tummies.

‘Plenaries’ is a lovely word and we had – new to me – half plenaries. Should that have been semi-plenaries really? Honestly, a classical education can ruin your life. Cavernous rooms where several hundred people sat around enormous circular tables. A great way to accidentally start talking to people, even though you fail to remember their names or what they said, or what you said, or what they looked like. Face recognition – is there anything I can do about it?

 

What about all this moving betwen classrooms frequently in the course of a packed day? What does it remind you of? School. That was what school was like. Difference being that in conferences they put fairly unpleant coffee at the back of the room and no-one misbehaved. Conferences are places for swots.

The social events are always a trial for me – being as i am in the bottom third of the networking capabilities population.

(to be continued….