Do you remember being six or seven years old?

When I was at school, and it was time to do art, every single person in the class sat down and produced a painting.

When it was time for writing, everyone wrote a story or a poem.

The annual school play had everyone in it, and we’d all sing a song when we were asked.

Some people were better than others at each of these tasks, but everyone got involved.  My paintings were always terrible, but I still conveyed something with paint, still produced a work that was distinctly mine.

As we got older, we somehow developed the sense that this was not permissible.  We started only doing the things we’d been told we were good at: only a few people got involved in the school play, and only the trained musicians got to sing or play instruments.

The world of adulthood seems even more divided: we each have a job to do, and we only paint or perform if there’s a chance someone else will judge us to be good.  It sometimes feels to me as though we all took it a bit too seriously when, as children, we decided that we were going to be astronauts, or policemen, or teachers, or train drivers.  Although most of us ended up calling ourselves Intelligence Consultants, Support Executives, Systems Administrators, Development Specialists and other such nonsense, it’s the same idea: we’ve all got our labels.

A while ago, I wrote about my desire to see ordinary people perform: “I’ve been thinking for a long time about how we can get so-called ‘ordinary people’ (by which I mean people that haven’t set themselves up as performers) to share their innate ability to entertain.”

Recently I found a perfect example: a brilliant feat of storytelling by someone who never claimed to be a storyteller.  It’s called ‘No Escape’, and you can read it here.  (It’s a 12-page PDF, and I think it’s worth reading).