Reading a week of sits without turning people into numbers
A week of sits can be counted. We count: started, left, returned, reached the bell. Counting is how we find minute four. Counting is not the reading.
The reading is the sentence we can stand behind in a room with the team. “People leave when the scan names the hands before the heat has gone.” That sentence needed counts. It also needed someone to listen to the audio at that minute and to remember what a Malaysian evening feels like on the skin.
We refuse a few habits that make the week untrue. We do not average a funeral week with an ordinary week and call the result a person. We do not rank programmes against each other as winners. We do not put a practitioner’s private journal — if the app has one — into the same folder as timestamps. If a team cannot separate those, we do not take the work.
Amira still sits on Thursday when she can, phone in the basket. The brass bowl does not produce a file. That is a useful embarrassment. It keeps the pages from sounding like they own the practice they describe.