I am leaving my half-drafted post about collaboration, which I started last week, aside for the moment. Still want to write about collaboration but from a different angle than originally intended. Yesterday, I was on a countryside walk (yup, I like me walks!) courtesy of a Meet up! group – a connection made through a new friend. There I was on a walk with nine people, eight of whom I had never met before and one whom I had only met briefly a week before (at a movement workshop). One of these walkers is called Michael and in a very unexpecte way we ended up talking about collaboration. My conversation with Michael particularly drew my attention to three ideas: (1) we are constantly in processes of collaboration – life is comprised of a series of collaborations (2) what might help us enrich our collaborations is to have greater awareness of of what we are bringing to them, e.g. our assumptions, prejudices, narratives (3) each of our collaborations goes through stages/cycles and so in times of challenge we might benefit from asking ourselves “Where are we at this collaboration?” rather than simply concluding “This isn’t working and can’t work” or “You are just impossible to work with!”