There’s a popular Søren Kierkegaard quote that has been shortened1 for modern-day attention spans consumption to:
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
It turns out our Encouragement Manifesto is nigh on 5 years old but we have been so busy cantering forward we have spent very little time ‘understanding it backwards’. As we started to dig around in the archives, we spotted that there was an evolution … gentle changes from first scratchings of Sharpie pen on pad to the current (final?) expression of the values at the heart of the Manifesto.
For the sake of completeness, it feels like we should record that evolution and muse about / share the thinking behind the changes.
Version 1 (10 April 2020)
April 2020, a time of uncertainty for many as the global pandemic manifested itself in isolation, social distancing, and fear of giving or receiving the virus. It was a huge contrast to our previous life as owners of a deli/coffee shop2
We spent time reflecting on what had made our small business work for so many loyal customers over the course of the (nearly) five years it was open (the reason so many people became friends who are still in touch all these years later). The use of the word ‘audience’ in the first version nods to the marketing mindset we were still in; but the general sense of supporting and celebrating others was woven into the heart of the values.
Version 2 (31 May 2020)
By the end of May, the Manifesto had been whipped into shape. ‘Audience’ clung on - perhaps we were overly conscious that there might be a ‘something’ to be offered under the Feasts & Fables banner, a slice of hospitality to be marketed to an audience. But No 1 and No 4 from the original had been wrapped up into a single intention to Celebrate Others, one of the core principles, a key behaviour.
We love how so many of the values survived intact in this version. Positivity, kindness and generosity - as per - 6,7 and 10, as you were. Even 8, which lost curation as a feature did not lose the intention of sharing inspiring stuff.
Version 3 (August 2020)
Towards the end of August 2020, we had gathered words from folk we admired about what the values meant to them, and we were turning our thoughts to what next. The language on this (final) version feels tight, so much sharper and easier to remember - not just for us, but hopefully for our emerging community of encouragers. Just in the nick of time too, because that September - coincident with the end of lockdown - we started to host the Encouragement Sessions.
These one-hour calls fitted the post-lockdown mood as folk wrestled with big questions about how they wanted to live their lives, how to create better balance between life and work, and how to harness the skills and practices they honed in the long periods of isolation.
What better way to celebrate folk than to be a pebble in their pond?
The full quote offer us a little less control over the way we live than the short version implies: “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards” (Kierkegaard)
We made the decision in August 2019 to close the deli at the end of January 2020, a particularly prescient decision in hindsight.