Swimming in Infinity

Chief Executive and Founder Andrew Ledgerton-Lynch OBE reflects on the art of storytelling, revealing a hidden device for tapping into unlimited potential

Close your eyes, take a deep breath and plunge right in – you’ll be swimming in infinity in no time at all. That’s how it ends. 

As a writer, I’ve never had a problem with the ending, nor the start come to that, although it can take a little longer to get going. The middle bit’s the mustard. That’s the journey, the buzz, the free flow. Who knows where it’s going and whether it’ll all come back together again, reunited to the unifying principle, whatever that may be? The less predictable, the more inspiring. The more inspiring, the more relatable. Experience mixed with remembrance and reimagining, presenting a whole new package of wonder and delight.

Before that, the beginning. There’s the churn, when I sit there and just type, trusting that sooner or later, eventually, it will start to flow. Sitting down and doing it is the crucial factor.

A former instructor of mine took a similar approach to coaching as he always prompted students to “just open your mouth and speak, trust yourself and it’ll be alright.” And he was right, it always turns out fine, eventually.

Hence writer’s block – or speaker’s block, if there is such a thing – has never been a problem. Now, mangling a sentence, writing, and come to that, speaking, utter tosh is another matter – I’ve excelled at that down the years. Even so, as I struggle to find the right word for, I don’t know “kitchen” and end up describing it as “you know what I mean, the place where you warm your soup up and drop bread into that poppy up roasting machine…” I trust that it will all come good in the end, that I will eventually find the flow and spiel away to the merriment of all so that the reader/listener will conveniently forget that two minutes ago I’d forgotten my own surname!

There is a way around this, with which we’re all familiar: AI. “AI can do it for you,” they say. “Don’t waste your time doing it yourself, get AI to scrawl away on your behalf, whilst you run a bath. On second thoughts, no, don’t do that, it’s too quick!” Not only is it good, we’re reliably informed, “it’s better than you’ve ever been or will ever be.”

Thanks for that, words of real solace to someone who’s spent their entire adult life toiling in front of a keyboard trying to be witty, clever, perceptive, or just plain better… Now AI does it in seconds and makes you look like a six-year-old who’s deftly managed to skip every English lesson since he started school. 

Or so you thought.

I gave it a go, I really did. I poured the entirety of me into the question box and told AI to write in the style of me. It did. Sounded just like me. Only better. A lot better. In fact, it was too good, too polished. Not a hint of a Yorkshire accent. Then I realised what was wrong. AI me is too good to be true. Real me is unstructured and unruly, prone to go off at a tangent, forage in the undergrowth of abstraction, raise a family whilst I’m there, go for a quick shop at Aldi and return to the gist of the conversation. 

Kafka captured it well in The Castle. Although Quentin Tarantino described it best in an interview I read years ago. He described how far too many films were like riding a motorbike for filmgoers. You can see the bend coming so you lean into it as you take the curve. This happens time and again, it’s that predictable. By the time you get to the third act you can write it yourself. He gave us flashback/flashforward, mumbled, jumbled Pulp Fiction and didn’t so much rewrite cinema as create a genre of his own, much of it a pale imitation, like AI reflections of you.

Being unpredictable is infinitely more compelling, for the reader/listener and for the writer/speaker. AI could give it a go but would not be able to gauge the audience’s reaction, feed off the energy and generate a vibe that opens the doors of the listener’s perceptions. 

This is where we begin to get closer to going for a swim.

If you watch closely and see them often enough, there’s normally a cue for when speakers get into the zone, or the flow. I tend to give an off-the-cuff comment such as “that reminds me of…” Speaking at a mental health conference, the Blue Light Speaker Agency’s Mark Hardingham CBE QFSM was adding great insight on one of his favourite topics – sleep – before announcing, “I wasn’t going to mention this, but as I’m on a roll…” You could sense the audience relaxing, opening up and off he went, free flowing…

AI is great for creating order out of chaos but the seeds of success are planted in the fog of the unknown and that is always worth exploring personally, often painfully, as you proudly hold aloft the blisters on your hands that came with battling through the undergrowth. AI never breaks a sweat.

“I imagine that imagination is as much subconscious remembrance as visionary inspiration”

Having said that, for those of you who like to cheat a little – to be honest, we’re all AI groupies now – there is an internal mechanism that is even more effective and superior to all of that techno gubbins: it’s the vast hinterland of the unconscious. It’s also remarkably easy to engage.

Before you panic and think you have to sit in a tent, inhale a plant-based substance of dubious origin, and chant a mantra, relax. Quite literally. Relax. That’s all you have to do. Before you go to sleep, plant a seed of an idea – a theme, a question, a notion, an idea, whatever – and ask your unconscious to ruminate upon it. Come the next day, it’s amazing how, when you sit down to write, or speak at a meeting, or address a tricky one-to-one conversation, how clear, concise and explicable you become. 

Having done it for decades, I often wake up with whole sentences rattling out as I observe the stream of consciousness cascade. Less a stream, more of an ocean, especially in terms of depth and reach. If that sounds weird, imagine what it’s like to observe your subconscious unfurl great reams of articulate prose whilst your conscious self looks on, desperate for the loo, but reluctant to interrupt that particular flow.

“Close your eyes, take a deep breath and plunge right in – you’ll be swimming in infinity in no time at all”

So what’s it all about then? What’s in it? What’s driving that subconscious stream or ocean? In short, it’s everything you’ve ever done or thought or seen, heard, intuited, experienced, acted upon, not acted upon, remembered, mis-remembered, interpreted, misinterpreted… it’s all there, much of it outside of your everyday consciousness. Throw in the Jungian collective unconsciousness and you’ve got yourself a party!

It may sound a tad weird, back to the tent and the dodgy plant-based toking. And to be fair it is, until you do it yourself and then it’s the most natural thing in the world and far more entertaining than any AI could ever imagine. On that theme, I imagine that imagination is as much subconscious remembrance as visionary inspiration. So, remembering the beginning, you can probably see the end approaching. And you’d be right. At least if this were an AI version.

Speaking of which, let’s use AI to have a peek at AI me. You’ve heard about AI me. Now meet him, or the elevator pitch version: ‘Meet Andrew Ledgerton-Lynch OBE, a visionary leader and trailblazer in the fire and emergency services sector. With over 25 years of experience, Andrew is the esteemed editor of FIRE magazine, where he has been at the forefront of fire safety and emergency response journalism. As the Chief Executive and Founder of the Blue Light Speakers Agency, Andrew connects audiences with inspirational speakers from the blue light services, sharing invaluable insights and experiences.

‘Andrew's dedication to promoting excellence and resilience in the fire sector has earned him numerous accolades, including the prestigious Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). His passion for unifying change and building a safer society is evident in his motivational talks and leadership philosophy. Whether hosting international conferences or pioneering fire safety campaigns, Andrew’s influence and expertise continue to shape the future of emergency services.’

“AI is great for creating order out of chaos but the seeds of success are planted in the fog of the unknown and that is always worth exploring personally, often painfully… AI never breaks a sweat”

Mmm… it didn’t think to put it in the first person, which is profoundly odd for an elevator pitch. The third person travesty aside – and come to think of it, the unnecessary second paragraph which could only be employed for an exceedingly long elevator ride such as ascending the Burj Khalifa – it’s the sort of thing that sounds nice on a promotional brochure. But I’d prefer the real me, warts and all and esteem be damned. 

Speaking of which, Mrs Ledgerton-Lynch inadvertently produced an elevator pitch for me when she holidayed in Dubrovnik, famous for lots of historical stuff, but of far greater interest to many these days as the filming location for Game of Thrones. Thus lots of merch. A small but powerful central character, Tyrion Lannister, the rebellious, riotous raconteur, preached this philosophical nugget: “I drink and I know things”. I got the t-shirt and wore it proudly with said quote. It seemed appropriate at the time.

However, as AI arrived with all the confidence and swagger of Stephen Fry pitching up as a ringer for the opposition’s pub quiz team, I realised I knew significantly less than I thought I did. Having adopted my new favourite quote from Socrates, “The only thing I know is that I know nothing, and I’m not quite sure I know that,” and as I no longer drink, the pitch would more likely be, “I got drunk and thought I knew things.”

Recently asked what I do, I rummaged for a one-liner but ended up muttering something along the lines of “lots of different stuff” before qualifying it with “some of it’s really good.” I might be naff but I prefer naff me to even naffer AI me. That’s what I call a naff off!

Listening to the early morning tides of consciousness crash upon the dry dock of wakening awareness (that’s pure me) – articulation and revelation beyond my conscious comprehension (again, all me) – you’d be forgiven for thinking the most sophisticated operating system ever invented is, and has always has been, readily available, without the need for Wi-Fi.  

“Real me is unstructured and unruly, prone to go off at a tangent, forage in the undergrowth of abstraction, raise a family whilst I’m there, go for a quick shop at Aldi and return to the gist of the conversation”

Like AI, it is fleeting though. All of that stuff flows through and out. If it’s not hard earned it doesn’t stick. The edited highlights, consciously trawled over, are what remain. Hopefully, they are the joyous, uplifting and occasionally insightful bits. Crazy bits. Cookey bits. Fun bits. Brilliant bits. But not the whole lot. To get the whole lot, well you have to do it yourself, enter the flow, tap into the self-driven mainframe.

Close your eyes, take a deep breath and plunge right in – you’ll be swimming in infinity in no time at all.