On The Value of Being Part of a Coven
One thing that I've been thinking about for a while, but has really struck me this week, is how nice it is to be part of a coven. I'm 85% joking and 15% serious. A coven is traditionally the term for a group of witches, but in this case I mean being able to spend time with a group of older women. Most middle aged men don't have the opportunity to joke around and spend time with groups of women in their 60s, 70s and 80s; it's just not how our society is structured. But because of our work through both in person and online courses, I often find myself in a coven.
What's amazing is how much you learn when you have time to joke around and chat with a group of people much older than you. I'm not even talking about deep philosophical wisdom or life lessons, though we do get a lot of that as well. I mean the observations and the collective memories of a place and the gossip and the local news that doesn't make it to social media or websites.
You end up hearing about how the apples are ripening a month early this year but there are no wasps. Then someone else chimes in about how they observed wasps congregating around a garden tap for water, which is behaviour they'd never seen before. Then someone hears the call of a corn bunting and someone else tells me that they're sometimes called 'fat birds of the barley' in Scotland. These serendipitous conversations arise both in person and through our online sessions for Strong for Life, which tend to be chatty, because we believe half the value of them comes from spending time with other people.
We hear about which protests our members are going to, what to do with excess plums, the best stitch pattern for wool socks, secret beaches in the area that you can only walk to, how the greeting of a Fifer is almost completely different to how you’d great someone on the west coast or what my father-in-law was like as a child.
These are conversations I'd never have and things I'd never learn if I were just sitting behind a computer. All the ChatGPT queries in the world would never uncover this kind of local knowledge or anecdotes. These are the sort of collective memories that won't formally be written down but add richness to our lives.
I think a lot about how our incentive structures devalue lived experience and try to replace it with training credentials or data. As someone who used to work in public health, I value the importance of data; when I first started coaching 20 years ago I was strict about measuring everything. There is an appealing notion of certainty when we write down numbers and track what is quantifiable. But the older I get, the less interested I have become in reducing everything down to a single variable and more I see the value of taking a wider view about quality of life. The more I do this, the more I think how we could all benefit from the weekly opportunity to learn from people outside of our normal bubbles.
More to come on this come…
As you may know, we’ve spent much of the summer reviewing our courses - going back over written feedback and having one-to-one conversations with former students about what worked, what didn’t, what they valued and what we could do better. It’s been incredibly helpful, and a huge thank you to everyone who has given us their time.
As part of this, we’ve been looking back over blogs we’ve written. I was re-reading a blog we wrote years ago and it struck me that, despite how much has changed at WildStrong - and how often over the years it has felt like we were feeling around in the dark trying to work out what we were building - this still feels remarkably true. We’ll re-post next week.
