A space of intimacy and difference

When we talk to people about joining Yellow, the thing we ask first is what has drawn them to it. This isn’t a ‘qualifying’ question, we aren’t looking for any particular answer, we ask because we are genuinely curious.

After all, Yellow is hard to describe and people come to it for many different reasons. But what we have also found is that in advance of any experience, people who are new to Yellow are often uncannily articulate about it.

For example, we recently had a conversation with someone neither of us knew at all (we didn’t even know anyone she knew). Her only contact with Yellow was the website. Her response to our question ‘what you brought you here’ was remarkable.

She said:
“There is a certain kind of conversation that I am interested in – sometimes deep, sometimes funny, but one way or another full of discovery. Such conversations require intimacy which means I only have this kind of conversation with my close friends. But because we are close friends, we tend to follow the same patterns. What I am looking for is a space where there is both this intimacy and difference. I think that’s hard to find, but I get the sense that it what Yellow is about.”

I was stunned (though that didn’t stop me furiously scribbling down what she said). I couldn’t have put it better myself – quite literally, in fact. Neither Alex nor I has ever come up with such an apt, clear, economical description – and not for the want of trying.

This has happened often enough to  make me wonder whether there is some kind of inverse law in play, where the more you know about Yellow, the less able you are to describe it (which means that having run over a hundred and fifty sessions in the last three years, Alex and I are in the worst position of all). 

This isn’t just about coming up with succinct soundbites, useful though that is. For me, these insights help guide what we do. Yellow is not simple. It is complex and layered and changing. And from time to time I can get confused about what it is we are doing. The traditional response would be to define it, to craft a consistent Yellow ‘brand’ essence that we stick to. Yet it seems to me that when you ‘nail’ things, you often kill them.

One day Yellow will die, as all things do. Who knows, we may even kill it off ourselves, but it would be a shame to do so unconsciously, whilst we are still in the midst of it; to let our own anxiety hollow it out and turn it into a deathly (but on brand) experience.   

I would rather trust the wisdom of ‘beginners mind’ and the intuition of people who don’t know what Yellow is, but sense or feel, what it could become.