this was originally posted on monday9am.tv
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I was recently caught out. Caught by surprise.
I had been commissioned to make a film for a start up company who wanted to show the world their ‘attitude’. Their naked attitude. After the work had been completed they decided to only pay me a part of what we had agreed. Because they had decided to change course. They had not run out of money, not truly.
Actually I had quite a peaceful reaction, perhaps even a non-reaction, to the situation, although I did chase it with an element of pretend drama as it was at a time when it put my family in quite a precarious predicament. Perhaps the nature of the unknown.
But the interesting part for me came in an email from the ‘founder/owner’ who still to the end professed to be acting ‘nakedly’. I have included part of a response I sent, largely because it made me think about the different fashions in which we believe we act.
‘ … naked is a state of being, not of doing. If one appears to be ‘naked’ but then changes the way it deals with the world in any fashion depending on whether its own best interests are served - then this is not naked. It is falling for the age old trap of telling the world what it thinks it needs to hear in order to achieve something and feel ’secure’.
Naked, in my understanding is to act from that absolute sense of who we are, no matter what. We all innately know this, even if we don’t always recognise and act by it.
A tall order I know, particularly set against the way business has often structured itself with many self imposed requirements.’
Being a Londoner, the irony of the situation didn’t escape me but I do wonder how many of us really do ACT in the same fashion no matter what?
How many of us really do expose ourselves unconditionally?
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POST-SCRIPT
* a few weeks after this article was posted, the money turned up in my account. thank you.
