Companions in Unusual Places: on islands, on spaceships and in coaching
On the strange places we find companionship — and why being really seen matters
Jan Batty
7/29/20262 min read
I went to the cinema to see Project Hail Mary last month and it reminded me so much of Cast Away from 2000, that I re-watched that too. In case you aren’t familiar with Cast Away, Tom Hanks is a driven Fed-Ex manager who survives a plane crash, washes up on a desert island and spends 4 years there. His only companion is a volleyball that he paints a face on and gives hair to. Tom talks to Wilson, shouts at him, argues with him — and it helps him survive the loneliness.
Let’s face some facts as we’re all adults. Wilson is an inert object. It can’t respond, though it doesn’t stop Tom, in his distress, imagining the conversation.
“Do you have to keep bringing that up, can't you just forget it? Huh? You were right.”
In Project Hail Mary Ryan Gosling plays a scientist who wakes up alone on a spaceship mission to save planet Earth. I won’t give away too much, but he encounters another spaceship with the same problem — something is using up the energy of their sun too. Rocky, the alien he meets, is a living, breathing being with a history, a partner back home, and a mission of his own. They have to learn each other’s language, and they discover a shared purpose. What’s striking is that they have fun. Rocky learns to joke: “Is joke! Ha-ha”. Together they combine their different kinds of wisdom to solve their problem.
When Wilson drifts away from Tom Hank’s raft we weep — not for the volleyball, but for what it meant to him, the part it played in keeping him company when he was totally alone.
But when there’s an explosion in the spaceship containing Ryan and Rocky, and Rocky saves Ryan at great cost, and we think he’s not going to make it, we weep for Rocky. We relate to him as a fellow creature, however strange.
Ryan’s relationship with Rocky transforms him. He changes from someone who can’t (or won’t) sacrifice himself for the earth and humanity, to someone who chooses to do it for a single alien being and a planet several thousand light years away. Through Rocky he rediscovers his humanity.
And while AI can be useful, it’s not the same as being met by a real human (or alien) presence.
Coaching is about being in relationship. It offers an embodied dialogue with someone who shares your humanity. A coach can notice tone of voice, sense when something is not congruent, spot a repeated gesture, and offer it gently as information. A coach can empathise, even without having lived the same experience, because we share basic emotions and can imagine what something might be like.
Being in that kind of purposeful relationship with another person can be transformative.
That’s something neither Wilson nor AI can do.
And we can make jokes.
As Rocky says in his newly-learnt English:
Amaze. Amaze. Amaze.
Happy. Happy. Happy.
If you’d like to find out more about coaching with me and my approach, book a free call.
hello@tinyhorsecoaching.co.uk
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