Our PechaKucha journey

"Four and a half years of too much, six minutes forty of enough."

A few days after Ingrid Lotze’s and my PechaKucha talk was posted, we sat down to watch the recording. It was out there for anyone to see, and I cringed. Not because the story was wrong, but because I could hear it in my own voice, the exact moments I'd forgotten my next line, in front of a room of 200 people, with the clock already running. More than thirty years around cameras and microphones, and four and a half years of nomadic life reduced to twenty slides and six minutes forty seconds, delivered once … and it turns out my brain still has no respect for my CV.

For anyone who hasn't come across it, PechaKucha is twenty slides, twenty seconds each, no exceptions. It’s a format that's fast, varied, and by all accounts a genuinely good night out. Standing on that stage was none of those things.

You can watch it here: https://www.pechakucha.com/presentations/ingrid-lotze-gavin-moffat-no-space-for-just-in-case

That's the bit nobody tells you about PechaKucha. The format doesn't ask you to write more. It asks you to decide what you're allowed to leave out, and that turned out to be the harder, more painful job. We couldn't talk about this. We couldn't talk about that. Whole chapters of the last four and a half years disappeared because they simply didn’t fit.

What surprised me was what showed up in their place. Not polish. Gratitude. Gratitude for the places, the people, and the version of us that took the leap in the first place. That gratitude is real, even with the lines I fumbled.

Ingrid and I talked about it afterwards, and we landed on the same word from two different directions. Hers was too much to say, how do you possibly get four and a half years down to six minutes forty. Mine was too much going on in my head, the noise of wanting it to look effortless when it very much wasn't. Too much, it turns out, is the same problem wearing two different coats.

It didn’t go as well on stage as it did in my head. There’s no re-take on a live talk. What’s on that recording is what happened, fumbled lines and all.

Oddly, that now feels like part of the story rather than a flaw in it. The whole point of doing hard things in public is that people don’t just see the finished version. They see the work in progress.

Looking back, I realised PechaKucha wasn’t really about fitting our story into six minutes forty. It taught us to trust that what mattered most would still be there after everything else had been stripped away.

If there’s a lesson underneath the twenty slides, it’s the one we wrote on masking tape and stuck to a bathroom mirror when we began this journey: No Space for Just in Case. Not just for suitcases. For what we carry. For the fear of leaving something out, just in case it was the one thing someone needed to hear.

It wasn’t too much. It wasn’t perfect. It was enough. And that’s another way of saying what we’ve discovered over the past four and a half years: what we don’t carry defines where we can go.