“The children can go straight in. The adults will use the small door.”
The clown at the entrance said this with a completely straight face, and my three kids ran past me into the garden before I could ask a single question.
Let me back up.
An hour east of Paris, on the Grand Morin river, there is an old watermill painted yellow. It is called Le Moulin Jaune, the Yellow Mill, and it is the home of Slava Polunin, who may be the most famous clown alive. If you have ever seen his Snowshow, you know what he does to a theater. A storm of paper snow swallows the whole room, giant balloons fall from the stage onto the audience, and we all turn into little kids, bouncing these enormous balls into the air with silly smiles on our faces, giggling, full of awe and wonder. He toured that show around the world for decades, and then he bought an old mill outside Paris and began building a place where the show never has to end.
The mill is also home to the Academy of Fools, which Slava founded in the early 1990s with Rolan Bykov, the actor and director, to resurrect carnival culture. It convened a Congress of Fools and awarded official titles to the best of the best, and one of those titles, I am told, was Total Idiot. When Slava’s own money for the Academy ran out, he went west to make commercially successful shows and fund the work with what he earned. The Snowshow has now played in more than 80 countries and won an Olivier Award along the way. A show this successful exists, at least in part, to pay for foolishness.
Today the Academy lives at the mill as a creative residency. Artists come with projects, stay in the dormitory, and make things that would never survive a budget meeting. I went this weekend with Jerome, my mom, and our three kids, and what we found was a gigantic park where art and nature are in unison, full of the most wonderful weird, weird art. There is a boat on the river with a tree growing through the middle of it. There are chairs hanging high in the trees. The gardens are organized by color, and walking from one to the next feels like walking between dreams.
At the entrance, the clown explained the rule of the house. Children walk straight in, because children still remember how to create and how to be joyful. Adults pass through a small door, low enough that you must bend to get through. The bending is the point. You leave your ego outside, and you remember that you were a child once, and that the child did not go anywhere.
My kids disappeared into the garden before the clown finished his sentence.
I loved the door on sight. I spend my weeks walking into rooms at full height, running companies and standing on stages and sitting with executive teams, and here was an invitation to leave all of it outside and go back into childhood and joy and silliness. I bent gladly. On the other side my eyes filled with wonder, and I felt like Alice stepping into Wonderland.
I say wonder deliberately, because sometimes we might use this word carelessly. I meditate every day, I live by the woods, presence is both my practice and my profession, and I would say I usually live in wonder and awe. Yet here it was taken to the next level.
I was in complete awe of the beauty of the nature and the weird, weird art living inside it, and my thoughts about work and about the world dissolved completely, and I was thrilled to feel them go.
At some point a barefoot man in a white wide flowing skirt walked past us carrying a gigantic white feather. He stopped by the lake and began to write with the feather on the water. The water kept nothing. He kept writing anyway.
Slava has a phrase for all of this. He calls the garden his sandbox. He rebuilt his whole life around a simple personal law, that if something does not bring joy, you walk away from it, and he decided that his home and his work and his art would be one continuous thing. So he lives inside his own installation, and a few weekends a year he opens the gates and lets the rest of us in.
He has also said that declaring yourself a fool is a step toward freedom. In his world, a fool is someone who sees the world differently and refuses to follow the status quo. A fool is willing to bend through small doors and write on water and make the beautiful useless thing. In one interview he described how a circus director would rehearse the acrobats and the jugglers in fine detail, and then announce the clown, and the clown would not yet know what he was going to do. The not knowing was the job.
One more detail from his interviews I recognized immediately. Slava has said the whole point of the place is to return people to the state of mind of a five-year-old, free and curious. In my own workshops, from Sofia to Beijing, I ask people to look at the person in front of them and imagine them at five years old. Who loved them. Who held them when they fell. I have watched rooms full of executives soften in two minutes. In my book I wrote that when you look for the child in someone, the disagreement becomes a doorway instead of a wall. Slava built an entire garden to do what I do with a question. We are in the same business, I would say. He simply has better props.
The word carries weight where I come from. I grew up in Soviet Ukraine, and Slava grew up in the Soviet Union one generation before me. In that world, standing out was dangerous, and blending in was a survival skill our parents taught us with love, because blending in kept you safe. Yet the same culture kept an old figure alive in its memory, the holy fool, the yurodivy, the one person who could say the true thing to the tsar. Everyone else at court had position and property and favor to protect. The fool had already given all of that up. The fool had nothing to protect, and so the fool was free, and because the fool was free, the fool could see.
I have been in many boardrooms, and I can tell you the fool is MISSING from many of them.
I work with executive teams on their hardest conversations, and what I notice again and again is how much energy in those rooms goes into NOT looking foolish. The strange question stays unasked. The half-formed idea stays in the notebook. The honest “I do not understand” stays behind the teeth, because the room might laugh, or worse, the room might mark you down without a word. Everyone protects their full height. And the conversation that needs a fool, the conversation where someone finally says the true thing everyone can see and no one will touch, keeps not happening. I have watched companies pay for that unhad conversation for years. It is expensive in a way that never appears on any budget line, and it is why I say that every conversation you are not having is costing you.
I wrote a whole section of my book about this. It is called Let’s Play, and it sits inside the principle I call the Rule of Us, because play was never a decoration in my method, it is one of the fastest roads I know from me-versus-you to us. When people play together, whether it is music or sport or goofing around, they let go of ego and expectation, and for a little while nobody is the successful executive or the concerned parent or the person with the strong political views. We are people trying to keep a rhythm going or not fall over laughing. The real differences do not disappear. Yet the walls come down just enough, and that is all a hard conversation needs.
Rick Rubin, the record producer, writes about this in The Creative Act, a book about making music that is secretly a book about everything. “As artists, we seek to restore our childlike perception,” he writes, “a more innocent state of wonder and appreciation not tethered to utility or survival.” Not tethered to utility. If Slava ever asks me what to carve above the small door, I have my answer ready. Rubin goes further about play itself. “We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun.” I read that and thought of every executive team I have watched polish a strategy document for three months while the one conversation that mattered kept waiting.
In my workshops I sometimes ask executives to role-play, to sit in their own employee’s chair and run the hard conversation from the other side. There is always a moment when a CEO looks at me with an expression that says, do I really have to do this, I am 52 years old. It is the look of a person standing in front of a small door. Bending costs something real. It costs the height. Yet everything interesting I have ever watched happen in those rooms happened after somebody bent.
Slava attributes the reach of his shows to working without words. You have to be without language, he says, for people to understand you everywhere. I know this to be true in my body, because I have been practicing a version of the small door for years without calling it that. In tango, which is my laboratory for everything, nobody enters at full height. You soften toward another person, you find your axis and offer your weight, and the embrace only works if the title and the résumé wait at the edge of the floor.
The dance is fully improvised, which means every single step is a small risk of looking foolish in front of a stranger. The best dancers I know are the ones most willing to take that risk, and they are also, not by coincidence, the most connected people on the floor.
My kids did not need the door. They had not yet built the thing it is designed to remove. Watching them run between the color gardens, I understood the rule at the entrance a little differently. The door does not humble us. It gives something back, a way of seeing we traded, somewhere along the way, for competence and the right to walk in at full height. We needed the competence. Nobody told us we could visit what we sold.
My own version of the door is a cup of tea. In my method, hard conversations start with one, a small ritual with a serious job, a few minutes that say we are two humans here before we are two positions. Standing in Slava’s garden, I understood that his door and my tea are the same move. Both of them ask you to set something down before you enter. He built his version in wood and made you bend through it. I pour mine.
I already have my small doors, and none of them are built from wood. I live by the woods and I go hug a tree before a big day. I meditate every day. Tango takes me there every time I step onto the floor. What I am still exploring is the small door inside the meeting itself, the moment where I can bend a little on purpose, asking the question I suspect is foolish, and saying “I do not understand” before anyone else has to, and letting a half-formed idea into the room while it is still half-formed. In my experience, that is where the real conversation starts, because the moment one person at the table stops protecting their full height, everyone else exhales, and the room remembers it is made of humans.
Before we left, I looked back at the entrance. From the inside, the small door looks even smaller. The photos from the weekend show the kids everywhere in that park, and one of me halfway through a very small door. I am keeping that one close. Even a person who practices presence every day is happy to have a reminder this beautiful.
Somewhere outside Paris, a man is writing on water with a feather. The water keeps none of it.
He keeps writing.