Sylvia's Journal

The tree is down. There is nothing but a stump left of that proud towering giant. And when it was down we realized that we had dodged another bullet. It was rotten to its core. The thought of what damage it could have caused should help us when the tree cutter’s bill comes in. It was two days of work, part of it in hail and sleet. We also won’t have to order wood for next winter.

Upon his return from PT Axel demonstrated his new finger dexterity. It takes tremendous effort to lift part of his fingers but the fact that he can was the best news in a long time. He is not quite there yet. The finger tips cannot come up by themselves yet. As for my nerve re-regeneration project, the regrowth of the nerves that go to my toes seems to be on a stop and go schedule: for weeks at a time nothing happens and then suddenly the line between normal sensation and abnormal sensation shifts by a few millimeters. I too am not there yet. I have actually resigned myself to the idea that this may never get completely right. It is annoying but not really a handicap and therefore would not be a bad outcome of a plane crash.

Axel had another session with Ruth and remarked that they are still not talking about the crash. I am not surprised. When you go into any therapy there is a lot of bagage that comes along and getting it inside the door is a lot of work.

I spent my day on the kind of detail work that is very stressful for me and hard to get in and out of. I am finetuning and cleaning up the facilitator material for our leadership programs that has to be easily accessible via the internet for all our leadership development teams that are operating around the world. I have now seen teams using our notes with less and less of our direct (as in stand-in-front-of-the-group) involvement and so I have a good idea of what the materials need to be and look like. It has been tested with teams in Nepal, Zanzibar, Swaziland, Kenya, Guyana and now Ghana. It is the sort of detail work that drives me crazy but I have to bite through it since the rewards (and cost savings) will be enormous. It has been something that is on my ‘to-do’ list since October and needs to be crossed off in the next few weeks, before I go to Tanzania in late February. I made huge progress yesterday.

I rewarded myself, after a wonderful soup meal cooked by Axel, with watching a movie and then reading another chapter in the book that Chris Kessler gave me in August called Deep Survival. That book turns out to be very much about our brains and how they help or hinder survival. Suddenly everywhere around me books and articles about the mind, the unconscious and brain bio – and neurochemistry show up. I find myself drawn to learn more about this exceedingly complex and fascinating part of our being. The EMDR therapy and the body memories it rakes up, the period of black out that may not have been unconsciousness, the sudden and unexpected bodily memories of the crash, and the conscious remembrance of the seconds before and after are all part of this reservoir of experiences that I am seeking to place in a meaningful and larger context. It seems that the universe is conspiring to do that; even an article mentioned on one of my professional ListServes – the Neuroscience of Leadership – turns out to be about the same thing(s).