Open your stupid

I was away last week hosting our fourth summer gathering at Bore Place, in sunny Kent – and yes, for every one of our four years there the sun has shone beautifully. This year’s event was as creatively inspiring as ever. I don’t want to give you a full match report, because if you weren’t there, why rub it in? But there was one ‘key takeaway’ – if you’ll excuse the term – that I wanted to share with you.

On the final morning we were doing some playful writing together, exploring what we had learned and sharing anything we wanted to carry back to the ‘normal world’. One person – who I won’t name here but will thank forevermore – wrote this note-to-self: it’s time to “open your stupid.” Let me put that on a line of its own so it has some space to breathe:

Open your stupid.

Writing is often – perhaps always – a serious undertaking that requires serious effort and serious focus. Even when you’re writing lightly and playfully, there’s something serious going on. But it is also, in many ways, stupid.

Trying to choose the right words and put them in the best order; trying to express your deepest thoughts and feelings with only 26 letters; trying to get other people interested in what you are doing; trying to do that again and again – there’s a real absurdity to it. And if you’re trying to make a living from it? That’s a special kind of stupid.

There are so many other ways of spending our limited days on this planet. Seen through the material/financial goggles of our times, so many of them make more sense than writing. For many people, and employers, in our shiny new AI-age, thinking and caring about words is an obviously stupid thing to do.

Yes, it is a stupid thing to do. And because we are writers, we will stupidly continue doing it.

I looked up the etymology of stupid. It comes from stupere, meaning to be stunned or amazed. At Bore Place, we spent four days connecting with ourselves, with each other, with the place we were in, using our minds and our senses, our memories and imaginations, constantly open to the possibility of being amazed by what we noticed, of being stunned by what took our attention, and then writing from that place.

AI can’t do that and won’t ever be able to do that. That’s one reason why it can’t write. Not properly. Not stupidly.

But we humans can. And we can do it easily. We just need to open ourselves to the possibility.

And what I particularly love is this: having immersed ourselves in such a fundamentally human way of being together in space and time, we can then stumble into such a playfully stupid way of describing it.

So, open your stupid.

You know it makes sense.