Receiving, or the difficulty of doing nothing

By the end of the day I am tired, with a physical tiredness, even though “I have done nothing,” because I have spent the day placing myself in a state of receiving. I said this sentence one day to students I was training, and it took me years to formulate. In mediation, receiving what others bring is the most demanding act.

The practitioner’s activism

Our professions value action. To be a professional is to do something: to organize a workshop, give instructions, accompany the participants, solve technical problems, manage time. The practitioner who does nothing isn’t working. That, at any rate, is what we have internalized.

This belief is a trap that pushes us to fill all available time with activity, never to leave any emptiness. By doing so, it closes us off to what comes from others. To receive what others bring, we need a free inner space; we need not to be in the middle of doing something else; we need to be available. Availability is the opposite of activism.

Donald Winnicott spoke of the capacity to be alone in the presence of another. This capacity, which a child develops by knowing that the mother is there even when she is doing nothing, is also what the mediator must cultivate. To be there, fully, without doing. To be available to what comes, without anticipating or directing it. From the outside this state of presence resembles passivity; it is a form of active attention.

We aren’t working right now!

I remember a workshop facilitator who was in training with me. We had sent some young people out to film on their own for forty-five minutes, so we had forty-five minutes to wait. We were waiting for them to come back. And she said to me, full of anxiety: “But we aren’t working right now! What are we doing? We aren’t doing anything!”

I explained to her that when the young people came back and we sat down to watch their films together, our role would be to receive. Perhaps it would not be what we had expected. Our work would be to give back to them what we had received from their films, what their films had done to us. To let go of our criteria of judgment, to give back what we had seen as precious, even if it was not what we had been waiting for.

To be in a state of receiving, that pause was needed. If we had spent those forty-five minutes in action, preparing what came next, tidying up, organizing, we would have been less open at the moment of return. That pause was a time of preparation for reception, time gained on the quality of our presence.

This quality of presence, at the moment when the participants come back and show us what they have made, is essential. Seen from the outside, it can appear superfluous: it is only a gaze, and a gaze changes nothing about the object it looks at. We have the impression that it is an addition, a commentary after the fact. But art is experience, as John Dewey reminds us in Art as Experience (1934). In creation, the moment of reception is part of the work; it completes the work as much as it reveals it.

When we have placed an order, when we have proposed a frame, asked people to film, to photograph, to write, our gaze on what they have produced is not external commentary. It is part of the creative act itself. The same does not hold for spontaneous individual creation, which follows a different logic, where the author is their own instance of validation. Here, we are the ones who commissioned the work, and our gaze is structuring.

If we do not exercise this gaze, if we do not give this moment the attention it deserves, we send people back to a terrible solitude. As though we had opened a door onto their expression, onto their sensibility put into shared space, and slammed it in their face. This violence is all the greater for following a movement of opening: we have invited the other person to take a risk, to show something of themselves, and we then fail to receive.

To be looked at is to exist. We know this in love relationships: someone who is not looked at loses confidence in themselves. We do not live in autarky; we are caught in a system of bonds. When we say that people must build their own self-confidence, that is true, but this building does not happen in isolation; it is structured by the bonds that hold us. Our role, at this precise moment, is to make a bond. This is what makes it so difficult to defend: we are making nothing, we offer a quality of presence that allows the other to exist.

This capacity to make a bond is internal; it is prepared and cultivated. When it is not there, the work we have patiently built can be undone in a few minutes.

The fatigue of receiving

It happens to me regularly, at the end of a day of workshops, to feel emptied. With an almost physical tiredness. And yet, when I look back at my day, I have the impression of not having done much that is visible. I have not fabricated anything, I have not edited any footage, I have not taught at the blackboard. I set up a space, gave a few instructions, then watched people work. After that, I looked, with them, at what they had made.

This tiredness is the proof that receiving is work, a work of transformation. When I receive what others have made, I open myself to something that does not come from me, that does not match my expectations, that may surprise me, disturb me, move me. I apply no filter, I take it in. This openness has a real energy cost.

The human brain represents about 2% of body mass but consumes nearly 20% of the body’s metabolic energy at rest. This consumption rises sharply when the brain is mobilized in sustained attention, which is the case when we receive what another person addresses to us. Several circuits work at once: working memory, which holds onto what has just been seen or heard; the prefrontal areas, which inhibit automatic judgments to make room for what is presenting itself; the networks tied to empathy and theory of mind, which allow us to represent what the other person is experiencing. Keeping these circuits active together, over time, has a real metabolic cost. The tiredness we feel at the end of the day has a precise biological reality.

The professionals of care know this, from the position that is theirs. Therapeutic listening is exhausting because it receives. One holds oneself in a state of availability to what the other brings, with their emotional charges and their silent inner work. Mediation through artistic creation mobilizes the same energy, in a different mode.

The time of looking

I have observed, over the years, that in most creative workshops a great deal of time is spent making and very little time looking at what has been made. Making takes up all the space. Looking at the productions is rushed at the end of the session, hurriedly, before everyone leaves. As though the time of making were the useful time, and the time of looking a supplement.

I propose the opposite. A quarter of an hour to make a photograph, an hour to look at it together. This imbalance restores the right proportion. Making is the moment when people produce something. Collective looking is the moment when this something acquires meaning, where the image becomes polysemic, charges itself with the readings of others, reveals itself to be richer than what its author had thought. It is the moment of symbolization.

This time of looking is also a time of mutual reception. Each person receives the gaze of others on their image and gives their gaze on those of others. This exchange does not pass through judgment, but through the sharing of what one sees, what one feels, what the image makes one think of. The heart of mediation lies there, in shared reception more than in making.

This gaze is costly for the mediator, but also for everyone present. Receiving what one has made oneself, and receiving what others have made, asks of each person an inner mobilization that nothing in our school or professional habits has taught us to provide. This is why these moments are difficult, and why participants sometimes have trouble remaining attentive. What we read as inattention is in fact the effect of an expenditure of energy that exceeds what we are accustomed to mobilize. Our role as mediators therefore includes an attention to the energy others are mobilizing in order to remain present, and to what we can ask of them without exceeding their capacity.

What mediators make by doing nothing

In our professions we have to give renewed value to the time of non-action: the time when we wait, when we watch others work without intervening, when we prepare ourselves to receive. This time is not dead time; it is time of inner preparation and openness.

What the mediator makes by doing nothing is availability, space for the other person, a quality of presence that authorizes the other to take a risk, because they know that someone is there to receive what they are about to do.

In a professional world that values productivity and measurable results, it is difficult to defend the fact that one is paid to wait, to look, to receive. And yet this is the heart of this profession, and what makes it demanding despite its apparent lightness.