Thinking Out LoudWere you in the room Wednesday night when Stan Grant delivered the 12th annual Richard Johnson Lecture?
There were over 500 of you, and I’m so glad I could come from interstate to be among that number. You can now listen online, and I’d encourage you to – it was a stunning assessment of our times, bleak and terrifying, but also gentle, and inviting us to choose the real and the good. But (with apologies to all who wanted to make it but couldn’t) there’s something about being in the room, shoulder to shoulder with friends and strangers, having braved the 37-degree heat and settled into the blessed embrace of the air-con; something about being moved to laugh or exhale or murmur or perhaps tear up in unison with hundreds of other people as we reacted in real time to the severe and wise and cerebral and deeply personal and beautiful things Stan had to say.
That solidarity felt in keeping with where he ended up. There’s so much militating against us just being human: our tech, 24-hour news, the way our politics and history have become weapons and only weapons, our performative hopelessness. Stan urged us to go to the places where people aren’t shouting. He urged us to do human things: to bake bread, look at the stars, have children, listen to music (good music; there was much dispute about this in the Q&A afterwards, which is also available now).
If I sound like I’m gushing, I guess I am. I don’t think I gush very often. But this week moved me. To, among other things, try to go where people aren’t shouting, and hear voices I might not usually hear, and choose simply to do things that put me in rooms (literal and figurative) with other humans.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.