The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

by Priya Parker

simply about breaking people out of their habits. It is about waking people up from the slumber of their own routines. As a facilitator, I seek to do that through the questions I ask and the exercises I run. But it is also possible to achieve a great deal of displacement through the choice of a space. As in the case of Wendy Woon, it takes imagination and effort more than anything else to achieve a little displacement. It is not more complicated than doing an activity in a place where people would think you shouldn’t. A dinner, for example, is generally thought best had on dry land. That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. However, one night in the Greek town of Kalamata, in the 1940s, the British travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and his friends had another idea. As the group was seated on the quay waiting for their meal to arrive in the searing heat, Fermor and his two companions silently picked up their iron table and carried it into the sea. They sat waist-deep in the water, patiently awaiting service. When the waiter emerged from the restaurant, Fermor wrote, he “gazed with surprise at the empty space on the quay; then, observing us with a quickly masked flicker of pleasure, he stepped unhesitatingly into the sea” with their dinners. The surrounding diners, amused at the spectacle, began to send the maritime diners wine in celebration of their insouciance. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fermor’s New York Times obituary would note that his “tables” were “reputed to be a...