Issue #01 - Small
Hello there
There are exactly twenty-five people on this mailing list right now, of which you are one.
I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. After a years with an email list 20 times that size, I was noticing this gnawing sense that while my audience was growing, it was also never enough. In the quest for ever increasing bigness, whatever we have is always less than we want.
So it feels a relief to start Where We Grow with a paradoxical ethos, in praise of small. That perhaps real growth doesn’t look like more followers, or friends, or cars, or bedrooms. Real growth might be imperceptible to external eyes altogether. That instead, the growth we are discovering is that which is felt; steadfast yet subtle, living deeply and quietly, on the inside of ourselves.
So I wanted to write this first letter to you twenty-five magical humans in praise of small. I have to thank my friend Marianne Cantwell, and by extension her late mentor Barbara Winter, for this ‘power of small’ concept, as we had a long overdue catch up in a Vietnamese canteen on Kingsland Rd last week. I was describing my new love for smaller things to M over pho and papaya salad. Yes, she said. You mean the power of small in a world warped by bigness.
That’s exactly it, I said back. It felt like a relief.
So here are three stories from the Where We Grow world, about what happens when we think small.
A story about small gatherings
“We need a workshop.”
For someone who spends a decent part of my week facilitating groups, I seized up a little. I’ve been doing this a while. And usually, when people say they want a workshop out of nowhere, they don’t really want a workshop. They want a back-covering, faux-engagement tool. A performative act of inclusion. They want to be able to say they engaged people in their plans, whether those people were actually engaged or not. For someone who knows what magic can be weaved when people gather intentionally, this ask feels like a wasted opportunity. It feels like pushing treacle up a wall.
So we played it differently. Just four people, two from two distinct teams, coming together because they are butting heads over competing goals and unstated needs. In a cosy room away from the day-to-day, they felt safer being vulnerable. It was easier to really see each other.
Great workshops are made when exactly the right people are invited. Not more. Not less. Which often means playing small.
Small creates possibility for intimacy and potency. It protects our individual strengths from in the inevitable synchronicity that happens in bigger crowds. In small spaces, we can’t hide so easily, and nor can anyone else. We want to make it easier for each other and ourselves. We have to connect.
With just five of us, we did that. Any more and we would have been watered down. Passive. Instead, we left the room having made something together.
A story about small wins
A mindfulness client; one of my first, told me this week that she can now meditate for 16 minutes a day. Our standard practices are usually 12 minutes.
She told me she is more relaxed, more of the time these days.
A story about small spaces
I bought a flat six years ago. At the time I was living in a massive warehouse with a hostel-like revolving cast of flatmates. Whenever I visited my new flat, it felt tiny and dark by comparison, almost too small for even one person – particularly a tall person like me. I rented it out.
I finally moved in there 5 months ago. And last week, I hosted thirty friends there for my first ever Halloween house party. People squeezed past each other in the galley kitchen and queued up for the only loo. They squished together on my little two-seater sofa. The next day, the common thread in my WhatsApp messages was “it was just so nice to be somewhere I could talk to new people.”
My smaller space brought more people physically closer together than my big warehouse could ever have.
Small lessons
So, what’s true here?
In smaller spaces and interactions, details are more pronounced, as fewer elements vying for our fractured attention. We can tune our awareness, attending to the voices that are that little bit quieter.
Celebrating the small is a kind of micro-rebellion against those parts of our culture so wired to celebrate and venerate the pursuit of more. More followers. More friends. More experiences. More. Pretending that quantity, not quality, is what really matters as a life KPI.
And at the same time, we find a simplicity and calm in smallness which can create oversized outcomes. To move into action, the advice is always take the first smallest step, and make it even smaller. To overcome a work challenge, a small face to face conversation can do more to smooth out edges than an email to a cast of hundreds.
I wonder what we can make smaller today, to create the possibility of something magical.
And a small request
I’d really like these letters to be a dialogue; not just me writing to you, with my only sense of you being the cryptic ‘Open Rate’ data on my email dashboard.
So let me ask you: what small things are making your life better right now?
And when you have a moment this week, write me back and tell me.
Maybe I’ll share your reflections with the other 24 recipients next time. And then we’ll know each other.
Until next time, with warm wishes
Kim
Founder & Facilitator, Where We Grow