I like attending the L G sessions and watching some twenty-or-less adults transform into child-like creatures for three hours, their eyes bright and wondrously animated, their breath fast and urgent, all of them fighting to speak what they think, to share what they know. For a while, you forget that you’re working in a Department where the officers are generally quiet and somber, going about their daily tasks with a candid seriousness which shows on their faces and the way they walk.
And it is moments like this that you realise we never really grow up. We simply pretend to a semblance of being grown-up. But the child in us, it is still very much alive, within us, and it only takes a catalyst to bring it forward, up from the deep recesses of our unconscious.
So that is what the L G sessions are to me. They allow the child in the officers, some of them hailing from senior and high-senior management, to come up and take a walk around. To see all of them laughing and moving around the room as if they have shaken off twenty years of their age, their movements fluid and uninhibited, their speech sincere and natural, it takes the stress out of work, at least for a while. Although the issues to be discussed – they assume – are serious and pertinent to the security of the nation, the brainstorming activities that the external facilitators guide them in doing do help to break the cold chains of adulthood and free the man-child within. A priceless moment.
