A pen or something good to eat?
On a hot June day in India, a young girl called Friday, sits at a desk in a prison, to teach how yoga works to her one student, The Captain. She picked up a freshly sharpened bamboo ink pen and held it up between the two of them. She asks “what is this thing?”, he replies “a pen, of course”. Friday, goes on to make a demonstration, she holds the pen up to a big black cow and within seconds the cows huge, slobbery tongue was out and enveloped around the bamboo, followed by a satisfying crunch.
Friday, pulls out another bamboo pen from The Captain’s desk and asks again, “what is this?”, he replies, defensively, “a pen”, with a boom she shouts “I don’t think you can say it’s a pen to the cow… isn’t it true she saw it as something good to eat?”.
This story is from the novel How Yoga Works written by Geshe Michael Roach and Christie McNally, a story based on the teachings from the manual of ancient texts for the study and practice of Yoga called The Yoga Sutra’s of Patanjali.
The pen metaphor expresses simply, how easy it is to think we all see the world in the same way. But, more importantly than that, it demonstrates how quickly we see things based on how we relate, how our actions, words, or thoughts we have make imprints on our minds. This relationality, is central to innovation, and the work of Kin and it’s re-public community. Having an ability to see the bamboo from multiple positions and perspectives enables us to experiment, to let go of categories and labels.
The word Kin derives from ‘cynn’, meaning family and being related to. It is a way for us to categorize, sort and put in place so it makes sense to us. These labels can make us stiff and rigid, Patanjali, suggests that ‘anything that makes us stiff can also break us. Only if we are supple will we never break’. Being supple and adaptive allows experimental and experiential behaviours to emerge. To poke, prod and test the edges of our boundaries of the categories we have for things. We can then glimpse beyond those boundaries and be comfortable in discomfort, safe in knowing that not-knowing is where new creative relationships are born.
This gives us unique capabilities – a place where we can notice when our old relationships, societies, our non-human friends don’t look like we thought they did or were never meaningful in the first place, helping all of us to design better futures.
To close this short piece, we meet back with Friday, the young yoga teacher. Later on in the novel, she is delighted with The Captain’s progress, as he breaks out of his usual thinking, he enthusiastically announces; “If it really were just my mind making me see this as a pen well then I could just decide to see this green stick as a bar of gold”.
I say, why not!
Image source: Tyler Dahl's bamboo dip pen tutorial