A long long time ago, in a universe far far away, I was a student. I struggled a lot with my teachers but they were fabulous enough to allow this. They put up with my constant questioning, my constant challenging, my constant misbehaviour. One day, one of the other students came up to me and said, “I was having a tutorial with Tony and he said I should talk to you about safety nets.” I said, “What?” He said something like: I have a hard time taking risks in my work and yet you seem to have no fear. I told him this was untrue. He said that he & Tony – one of our teachers – had been talking about taking risks and about ‘safety nets’. In the circus people display very risky behaviour but they always work with a safety net, just in case they fall. This safety net provides a comfort level, an imaginary magical barrier that allows the circus performers to do stuff that otherwise they would and probably should be too scared to do. So safety nets are important. But if your safety net is too “secure” then it can strangle you. If it is too tightly wrapped around you like a blanket then it does not give you room to do very much. (And it is very easy to get very attached to a security blanket and it will stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.) But in the circus half the fun is the danger. The audience should know that the safety net is there, but it should not be too visible and they should be unsure whether it really really would work. There should be a delicious tension watching people doing crazy stupid amazing things, wondering “Oh dear, if they fall would that net really save them?” But, as the circus performer, if you do not believe that the safety net will protect you then you do not trust it & this will also stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to. So this guy was asking me these impossible questions – How do you lower your safety net? How do make it less visible? And when or how or should or can you work without a safety net?

“But you seem to have no fear,” he said. And I told him this was untrue, that I am scared all the time. The trick is to figure out how not to let that stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.

For me, I guess other people are my safety net. It really helps if you are working with people that you can trust, that you can be open with.

We are still new at working together but we are learning quickly and we are trying to be honest and to be brave. We will spend about 10 days in this village called Gozdowo and we hope it will be good. There will be some visits beforehand and our “alphaGroup” of students has already done a project there last year so they are knowing people and of course this is helpful. But of course also, when you have many partners and many students and when you are trying to be non-(or at least less-)hierarchical in your approach then sometimes planning and preparing yourselves is not so easy… because different people need different kinds of safety nets in order to feel fearless.