Slow down and experience the magic of the spaces in-between. So says David Pearl, Founder of Street Wisdom.

It’s based on the simple proposition that the environment and people around us are full of wisdom, yet we largely overlook or ignore these.  Street Wisdom teaches us to tune into the rich stimulus and learn.  Their strap line says –  ‘answers are everywhere – you just have to ask‘ and to our delight we found this to be incredibly so yesterday when we were invited to experience this as part of the RSA’s events programmes for Fellows.

As the group gathered outside the stunning RSA building (turns out that David Attenborough was inside giving a talk on Climate Change), the group then split into smaller teams and all headed off into the streets of Covent Garden to be given instructions by our guide (ours was a mindfulness teacher at the RSA) on what to do over each stage of the next 3 hours of street wisdom experience.  Each one hour session has an objective in mind and are called TUNE, ASK and SHARE. They are specifically devised to help us tune up our senses in order to pick up far richer information from the environment that you would normally.

I must admit I was a little sceptical. I’d already had a few hours in London on my own, so felt relatively chilled already. Did I really need to do these exercises? What would I gain from more wandering with one key focus each time?  Yet the magic of these 3 hours really are in the simplicity of the quests. So I reminded myself to be open to whatever came and before I could draw any conclusions, we were then sent off on another new journey, by ourselves – our street quest – where we were told to come up with a key question. What burning issue did we each need to resolve, or what was holding us back? Each armed with a focussed question for ourselves, we had an hour alone (well, alone on the streets of London) to see what answers were presented.

And for me (and many in the group) I found it utterly amazing what you can learn when drawing in from your environment. My question was a relative biggie ‘what did I really want from this life’. Yet the more I wandered and watched and soaked up my surroundings, the more the answers flowed.  They seem obvious in many ways, but are profound in their simplicity, so here they are:

• To remember to always enjoy life, to see the beauty in the challenges
• To have fun
• To explore
• To travel
• To learn
• To surround myself with authentic people
• To keep things simple
• To develop and grow
• To taste (I love good food)
• To love and be loved 
• Be outdoors
• Aim to be the best you can be, whatever you are doing

And when everyone gathers at the end of the 3 hours to share what’s happened to them (and many proclaimed their wonder at how magical an ordinary street can become when you’re really aware of those hidden messages) it was clear to me that these very simple exercises were often seriously profound.

So impressed we were with these magical 3 hours that we are now licensed to run out own Street Wisdom experiences over the coming months. Sign up for updates and learn more about what we offer for organisations here. When we offer free public events they’ll be listed on our events page. In the meantime enjoy this video by the founder of Street Wisdom, the very wise David Pearl.