The Children of Nine Lives.

This article relates the author's experience with eight children in a group relations training. When one came to think about it, they all were exceedingly brave, even suspiciously loyal to stay together, to stay as a group for as long and as intensely as they dig. Every Tuesday afternoon at 4:00, at 4: precisely, they dragged or bounced or hunched into the little seminar room on the second floor, flopped their coats on the backs of the chairs, sat down, jumped up again to jabber about food and then settled in for two hours of talking, joking, thinking and hard work. There were eight of them. As in a round or nursery rhyme, there was in fact a gentle but still sturdy ritual about the meetings. One never spoke in the idiom of organizations and capital government with words like, "having a dialogue" or "confrontas sessions," but there were modestly protective rituals, linguistic and otherwise, a concatenation of preparative actions, somehow required if not actually religious, purposeful and seriously intended, if not obsessively transacted.