A look-in on a Life Café
On a chilly autumn day in King’s Cross, the mid-morning bustle is in full swing. With solemn focus, it is power walking, horn honking and train-dashing its way between the milestones of today’s busy schedule. Only the huge cranes standing sentry over high-rising towers seem to pause occasionally amid the rush.
Against this backdrop, today’s Life Café feels timely. Amongst other things, it will touch on the relentless pace of modern life; how a daily phone call can prevent suicide; and the occupational hazards of scattering ashes at sea.
Life Cafés are gatherings where people do a series of creative activities together that are designed to stimulate conversations about, well, life: the meaning of it, the end of it, and care. The whole session typically lasts a couple of hours, and the activities are chosen by facilitators from a kit that’s about the size of a large board game.
The kit was developed through research funded by Marie Curie, and every aspect was informed by the input of real participants so it’s designed to resonate. Some of the activities are game-like, some are more serious, and facilitators choose exercises to respond to how groups are doing on the day. This means each session can be carefully tailored. Each part of the kit has been carefully crafted by professional designers to look warm, inviting and accessible.
You're giving people permission to say things.
Dr Claire Craig and Helen Fisher are today’s facilitators, and they’re part of the team that developed the Life Café concept with funding from Marie Curie. A Reader in Design and Creative Practice in Health for Lab4Living at Sheffield Hallam University, Dr Craig explains that people often find it easier to talk about difficult subjects when there’s something else – even a simple everyday object – to use as a proxy. “Over many years of research, we’ve shown that objects have this ability to give people permission to say things. And because it’s so alien, you can be quite personal but in a way that gives distance. That’s the power of all these things – people are talking through them.”
From love to Jiu Jitsu
Today’s Café starts with a simple word association exercise: participants fish a letter from a bag, like in Scrabble, then say a word beginning with that letter that describes them. “Range”, “understanding”, “love”, “Brazilian Jiu Jitsu”, “obese”… A motley assortment of words – probably never to be repeated in sequence for the rest of time – breaks the ice.
To illustrate the principle of people “talking through” objects, the group is then split into pairs and each person chooses a picture of something that has meaning to them. They talk to their partners about it, then share with the group. Julian chooses a guitar because he plays in a band; Holly chooses a church because she travels a lot and tries to find them wherever she goes; Maria chooses a seascape because she scattered her husband’s ashes into the ebbing tide of a favourite beach.
Even at poignant moments like this, the Life Café produces light-hearted moments; it wasn’t, in fact, an ebbing tide but a rising one, so Maria’s husband “kept coming back”. She notes wryly, “I want my ashes scattered in the sea too. But I’ve told my son to watch the tide when he does it.”
I've started trying to do more things that I want to.
Next we move on to random objects and amongst other things, the participants are inspired by a humble hourglass to talk about the speed of life. How we don’t stop to think about what we want and where we’re going. The inexorable quickening of time.
Holly, the 27-year-old project manager who earlier talked about churches, says that the recent deaths of her grandmother and another close relative have inspired her to start treating time differently. “I’ve started trying to do more things that I want to and not feel pressured into doing things out of sheer politeness. With one close family member being only 50 when she died, I was like ‘Oh my god, there’s probably loads of stuff that she thought “I didn’t want to do that … I ended up doing it, and actually there was x, y and z that I really wanted to do.”’
“Travel is a massive thing for me and while I’m young and able and it’s financially viable and I don’t have health issues, I will do that. I’m a bit cavalier towards my work life. I will work as hard as I need to in order to pay for the things I want to like, well, flights!”
She'd felt like giving up on life.
With such simple objects able to provoke a seemingly endless supply of profound experiences and philosophies, it’s not surprising that Dr Craig has seen some remarkable moments in her time facilitating Life Cafés. There’s no doubt in her mind as to the most extraordinary though.
“We were running a Life Café where the people around the table vaguely knew each other. Somebody in that group talked about how, at one point, she had been so low that she’d felt like giving up on life. But that the actions of somebody phoning her up every day had made her carry on; the person who had phoned her every day was sitting at that table.
“When she said ‘It was you’, the other person didn’t know that because of what they’d done, she hadn’t ended her life. It was just the most amazing thing. There was this lovely moment of people just going ‘Wow’. Everyone could recognise that everything we do has an effect on people. And for him to be able to say ‘Look, thank you’ was a key moment for him.”
Fresh perspectives
The session closes with people taking small white figurines and writing on them the key aspects of good care. One figurine simply says:
S
P
A
C
E
Another says THEY ARE THERE WHEN YOU THINK YOU DON’T NEED THEM. Each figurine represents an individual viewpoint, but it’s immediately clear that each viewpoint is something everyone can agree on too. In this way, the Life Café represents a way to exchange thoughts. It’s a way for people to be inspired into thinking and doing differently to improve their own wellbeing, even if that’s only a small, incremental shift in the way they look at the world.
Because of a Life Café, people have better care.
Which is all very valuable, but encouraging groups of people to open up and think differently isn’t the sole purpose of the Life Café. The Lab4Living team is working with Marie Curie to run Life Cafés in care homes and hospices, helping people to work out what their own individual care preferences are and, where possible, tailoring care provision accordingly. As Dr Craig says in one of the day’s word association exercises, “If good care was a detail, it would be three pillows instead of one.”
Co-facilitator Helen Fisher added: “We’re so thrilled to be supported by, and working with, Marie Curie because you see people’s lives affected. You go back to the care homes and you see that because of a Life Café, people have better care and you think ‘Isn’t that the most wonderful thing’. It’s not expensive, it’s simple. But you wouldn’t realise just what such a simple intervention does.”
For more information on Life Cafés, visit lifecafe.org.uk
You can also buy a Life Cafe toolkit from the Marie Curie shop.
