Thesis Brain, Thesis Body & The Antics of Time

It is the morning after thesis hand-in. Yesterday we sent off our brainchild, emptying our hands and jumping in the sea for a cleansing. But still I barely feel the breeze, and my vision has become shockingly fixated on screen distance. I sit in uni writing this now because I can’t go cold turkey on my laptop yet. I still feel a bit wobbly after our passage through the birth canal, the high pressure moment of hand-in after 5 months of toil, where with increasing intensity our lives came to revolve around thesis, all other things pressed to the margins of perception by the centrifugal force, where they blurred from view. So much we’ve learnt, about research, about our topic, about teamwork.

Our brains at work

The scientific method has captivated me. So quick and insidious our minds are, and it was only through constant questioning with every mental step of the way, that I could catch my brain in the act of making assumptions, jumps in logic to make an argument. So trippy the intricacy of our own mental labyrinths, let alone finding our way in those of two other thesis mates! A few weeks ago we experienced ‘data paralysis’.  This whole year we’d been learning about the importance of shared mental models (maps for navigating collective mental labyrinths), and still we found we had neglected ours and that the compounding subtle inflection points left us stranded with three mutant models. So bogged down in the research we were, that we could only still see the complicatedness. Luckily we had felt good about every step of the research, so we could trust that our subconscious had been making very clever, strategic decisions, and now it was for our consciousness to catch up. We made the best choice we could have made, a week before the final draft deadline, and gave ourselves a whole weekend off to give space to the simplicity to resurface in slow time, while we relished the first days of Swedish summer. It worked like a charm.

After sorting our brains out, it was time to apply them. My thesis pal described it as travel sickness: for two weeks we had (attempted to) stayed at the high level overview, and now we were freefalling into the detail of re-writing and editing. Two of us entered the Thesis Cave and pitched camp there, not leaving its and each other’s side for 6 straight days and nights of work. We could only still see and hear everything through the structure of our research, were writing and re-writing in documents and in minds 24 hours of the day. At night, my brain tried to fit the entire world into conceptual frameworks, so active in its processing and puzzling that its whirring woke me up at 6:30 for mornings in a row with new revelations. It was delicious. There hasn’t been a moment where I wasn’t fascinated by our work, such a passion project this has been.

The heart of our thesis

Our thesis is on youth empowerment, nature connection, and on sending young people on camp to build a care for nature and others deep enough that it will translate into action when either are in trouble – on raising empowered sustainability advocates. We have interviewed and met such inspiring practitioners from the field, their hearts high with the power of the work they’re doing. We have seen their hunger to share knowledge and experience with each other, and in extension their eager interest for our work. And we have felt how this research has become a doorway, a flexible platform, for our personal futures that want to build on this. All the avenues and initiatives to be explored. Last week we were on our second visit to the thesis cave, five days this time of pizza and all-nighters, deconstructing our whole thesis again and building it back up for the final submission. In the middle of this, we went camping for a night with a group of us on the island of Aspö. It is early summer here now, and the birch forests are bright green, and the great crested grebes are mating, and sky is filled with geese migrating. And the great tits and blackbirds are singing. And the magpies, the wood pigeons, the woodpeckers, the nuthatchers, the oystercatchers are talking. And since a few days even the swifts are back. And the wind was at our backs around the campfire on the rocks by the open sea, blowing fiercely around our stories. I have been camping all my life, yet this time it was different. I have so much more knowledge now about the value this brings to young people who’ve never experienced this, about rituals and practices that foster connection, compassion, confidence. We are becoming experts of theory on something that has been with me my whole life, and wants to come back in my future. It is beautiful.

The bodies of our team

To be sharing this passion and deep process is such a gift. It is one of the Great Learnings from this transformative year. That you can choose to work with friends. That you can not only get lucky with coworkers you like, but that you can actively choose to share something that takes up so much of your life, passion, purpose, with people you love! Speaking of empowerment… I want that! And yet, part of the thesis process has been accepting the fact that I shared this with one, not two, of my thesis mates. This brings me to another of the Great Learnings from this year. That while we may differ greatly in our translations and satisfying strategies, we as human beings all share the exact same needs and emotions, and can therefore be understood, and then accepted. And on this basis, we can be honest and transparent about our needs and emotions, knowing they ultimately all make sense. How much suffering can be resolved and avoided by being honest, and acting from that understanding! In this way, I have been learning so much from all those very different from me, as well as those so much like me. Housemates, thesis mates, friends… They are the first mirror, the most revealing. They show me to all the demons, all the rocks, all the blind spots that need healing. That’s why I don’t live alone, I’d be stealing so much waxing consciousness from myself!

Consciousness training

That’s it. It is this consciousness that MSLS trains and elevates in us. In this consciousness my future work lies. It is this consciousness that I came home to at the Art of Hosting training and YIP Initiative Forum, where it is so present in the room; that led us to start a tradition of gratitude beads in our thesis team, a practice gleaned from one of our partner organisations; that moved us to set up a thing like the Future Council, a tribe within a tribe that meet weekly to move together through the big questions of what’s next, and will maintain its role as council when our bodies part ways. It’s the same consciousness that is the portal into the deeper layers of the people world, as well as spirit world. And for those of us who are onto its trail, we are sorcerer’s apprentices, learning to work with forces we don’t yet understand. It caught our attention, a fleeting movement in our lateral vision. We can’t grasp it yet, can’t name it yet, but we have ventured in. I am seeking it with my hands, this sense. I am testing the air, resting my empty hands in there, waiting for that feeling to become tangible and land in them, so I can grasp it like reins and my body becomes the tool. I know it’s coming.

Back to the wider present – the antics of time

Now that we are on the other side of the thesis deadline, we can shift our attention back to the wider present: we are moving into our last month here. Time has been behaving as strangely as ever, writhing and curving, circling and stretching, slack and taut, fast and slow. With the coming of summer, we are coming full circle to a season we have experienced here before. It brought back remembered feelings, thoughts, body sensations so strongly, so instantaneously that it was like time looped back onto itself. The depth and speed that we’ve been moving at with thesis has left us with no capacity to engage with the realisation that the days of this beautiful Karlskrona life are almost up. Slowly now, the thesis dust will settle, opening up space to arrive in that wider present again. And then we will find it will be such a sudden drop into lazy, luscious summer that it will feel like vertigo. Vertigo all the more because that drop will also be the abrupt end of this Karlskrona life, and we will find ourselves balancing on the edge of the abyss, the void of a life disintegrating.  The transient nature of time will roar back into life, we will hear the wheels churning. It will force us into that bittersweet gift of retrospection, reflection, selection of what to take with you, what to leave behind. I will try to walk slowly these last weeks, soaking up and savouring this everything. And after that, close my eyes and take that leap. Hi Future! Catch me please.