LITMIR.BIZ

       3 Belonging to a Group

      Meeting someone for the first time and wondering whether you are going to be friends can be stressful, but how do you manage when you meet a crowd of people and you are all going to be together for some time? I felt extremely anxious when I sat in the domestic air terminal in Athens and wondered which of the people around me were going to be the participants in the group I was to run at the Skyros Centre on the island of Skyros.

      Ten days later, when I knew and liked my group very much, I asked one of them, Janna, how she had fared in meeting all the people who would be at the centre. I had travelled to Skyros on a small plane a day early and so had met the staff and some of the participants in twos and threes, but Janna, who was travelling on her own, making the long journey by coach and ferry with those bound for either the Skyros Centre or its twin centre Atsitsa, was presented with what she saw first of all as ‘an amorphous mass of people’.

      Janna told me, ‘It was quite a stressful time because you don’t know these people, and you’re wondering who’s going to be in your group and all that. Then I ended up sharing a room with Inger, and that’s been great. But that amorphous mass I experienced mostly at breakfast and the first few meals. People seemed to talk so much. There was a heightened state of chatting. I’m not sure what that was. I think it’s because we all wanted to engage with other people. There were gales of hysterical laughter which happened a lot. It was very noisy, which, certainly at the beginning, made it seem as though there was a huge body of people.’

      I had experienced this ‘heightened state of chatting’ when I went on several game drives in the African bush with a group of American tourists. There were nine of us, including the ranger, who drove our vehicle, and the tracker, who rode shotgun. The great silence of the African bush was there to be savoured, but savour it we did not because everyone except the tracker and me talked all the time. The ranger made no idle conversation. He informed us about what we were seeing, and answered every question, no matter how inane or repeated it was, in a courteous and informative way, but around him words were being wasted at a prodigious rate. My fellow tourists bombarded the ranger with questions which might be about matters of detail but were rarely profound. One woman asked, ‘Do people ride zebras?’ and, on being told that zebras were untameable, commented, ‘What a pity. They’d be so colourful at a rodeo.’ When the questions were exhausted the tourists engaged one another in earnest chat on a wide variety of impersonal topics. I found it bizarre being driven through this magically alien bush while behind me the conversation was about the relative merits of certain e-mail servers.

      But, of course, it was the alien bush that was the problem. I might have had faith in my ranger and the game reserve’s system of constant radio communication but my companions did not. So they talked to one another to keep their fear at bay. The same thing happened when, one evening after a very hot day, a fierce but very beautiful electrical storm converged on our camp. Dinner for some twenty tourists was being served on the veranda, where the noise of conversation all but drowned out the thunder.

      One way of dealing with fear is to turn it into a story, a fantasy about what is feared and how that fear might be overcome. On the third of our game drives my companions did just this. One of them was a literary agent, and he began developing an idea for a novel about a group of people who are on a game drive in this very same park when, for some reason, the ranger and the tracker disappear. How would these people survive?

      This was the nub of the fear they were feeling. They were a group of professional people and therefore useless if left to fend for themselves in this bush full of dangerous animals. They needed a fantasy to assure themselves that, if abandoned by the ranger, they could survive.

      Their fear was not just about abandonment in this alien place. It also had to do with the hierarchies in the group. In the conversations amongst the tourists not just on the drives but over meals there was constant jockeying for position. Evidence of position, power and wealth was cunningly presented by being implied not just in their statements about their nationality and work but also in the extensiveness of their travels. ‘When we were in Botswana’ could be topped by ‘We much preferred Namibia to Botswana’. Such conversations were not merely to improve one’s position in the hierarchy. Along with the conversations about cameras and computers the conversations were aimed at showing that the person speaking was knowledgeable and in control.

      The rangers were well aware of this. One of them told me, ‘The South Africans are the worst. They always want to make out that they know more than the ranger.’ A hierarchy might be established over dinner with, say, a captain of industry or a judge claiming superiority, but such a hierarchy would be thrown into doubt the next morning, when the ranger became the leader on whom the tourists’ lives depended. This was a particular problem for some of the people in the group which I had joined. They did not like being dependent on a twenty-two-year-old, no matter how skilled and conscientious he was, and one of them at least made sure that before he departed he had patronized our ranger and reasserted his authority to his satisfaction, even though it meant being offensive to his hosts. This man had built his identity – his meaning structure – on being a powerful leader. No matter what the reality of the situation was, he could not cope with feeling helpless and dependent.

      At the game park tourists came and went every two or three days so the groups and the hierarchies existed only briefly. At the Skyros Centre twelve of us had committed ourselves to being together for two weeks, so forming a group and sorting out hierarchies and allegiances was tremendously important. None of us had ever met before so it was very much a matter of stepping into the unknown.

      When Janna was a university student she had recognized that she had anxieties in joining a group. Like most extraverts she had feared that, as she saw alliances being made, she would be left out completely. She said, ‘Everybody else might come together and I’ll be the one on their own.’ However, she discovered that ‘Things do shake down and you find yourself with the kind of person you want to be with.’ Years later, at work or when she went on retreats, she realized that this was always the case. She knew that out of that amorphous crowd of people one or two would emerge with whom she would connect straight away. When she met a number of people for the first time they had for her a certain ‘feeling tone’ which grouped certain people together, and then out of these groups individuals emerged. At Skyros someone who stood out immediately became a close friend. Janna told me, ‘Sandra and I connected up early on. We laughed a lot together, so that’s a good start. And she had interesting things to say. So it’s a take on the world. That’s what I’m looking for, I suppose, an interesting take on the world, which is maybe complementary or different to mine.’

      Understanding how we operate in groups is not easy. Robin Dunbar, in his book about language and gossip, commented, ‘It’s now clear that understanding the social world is a far more difficult task for children to master than understanding the physical world.’¹ Adults have the same problem. It is much easier to understand the physical world than the social world because we can separate ourselves from the physical world and observe its behaviour. In the social world we might like to think that we can separate ourselves from other people and observe their behaviour but there is one crucial difference. When I observe the workings of an internal combustion engine that engine is not observing me and forming ideas about me. When I run a workshop and observe the behaviour of the participants they are busy observing me and one another, forming interpretations and adjusting their behaviour accordingly. We do not just interpret one another’s behaviour, we interpret one another’s interpretations, and so on.

      My workshop which Janna had joined was about how we make sense of the social world, but, of course, while I was trying to give the participants some tools for understanding their social world, their actual social

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