Sylvia's Journal

This morning when I woke up I had part of my daily journal already written in my head. This is what the daily practice of journaling has done to me; when I wake up I am already writing in my thoughts and the writing occurs while I notice things around me. Maybe that is one thing the crash has changed in me: I am more observant than I was before. I suppose that observation becomes a matter of survival when your world has shriveled up to a very small view, as it did for a while.

So this morning when I got up I noticed the wind whistling through the cracks of our house; I noticed the exquisite and delicate ice flowers on the windows and the sun in the blue winter sky. I also saw the dust bunnies under the bed (and left them where they were – waiting for Axel to find them and do away with them, as his tolerance for dust bunnies is so much lower than mine). But as soon as I sat in front of my computer the workday started with a vengeance that never let off. It is only now at the end of an intense and very long day that I get to do my morning write. Of course the journal entry written in my head some 15 hours ago has vanished and I have to make something up all over again.

It is therefore no wonder that, once again, I found it hard, this past Sunday, to settle down and center in my Quaker Meeting. It took me most of the hour. Once in that state of ‘expectant silence’ I could have stayed there for hours but the agreement is that after one hour we get up. I have come to regret the words that break the silence. I wish I could get into that state of suspension faster. But that wish by itself appears impatient and is emblematic of my hurried life.

Once home (Sunday), I found Axel where I had left him, in his jammies on the couch, totally absorbed by his new library book, a detective that takes place in the Turkey of the mid 1800s. He managed to stay in that place (Turkey and the couch) most of the day and finished the book in what appeared to be one long reading sweep.

I was a bit jealous because I had to do work. I have started to facilitate a virtual leadership program, taking over from my colleague Morsi, and will be on facilitator duty for the next two weeks. There are about one hundred participants in this course from Yemen, Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, Mexico, Tanzania and South Africa. Since the Yemeni and Tanzanians are eight hours ahead of us I have to do my daily posts (another sort of daily journal) before I go to bed so that they find something in their email boxes when they start their workdays long before I do. But in order to write my message to them I have to do a lot of reading on the site in a place we call the Café. The Yemeni and Egyptians are particularly chatty and the task of reading up on two weeks of chatting took a good chunk out of my Sunday.

Axel was so good to cook diner for his working wife and pulled out the Turkish cookbook, inspired by his reading, and made a wonderful pilaf from leftovers.

And so now it is Monday night and it is past my bedtime. But I needed to download my unwritten journal page to make place for tomorrow’s.