Sylvia's Journal

I woke up early when my dreams had sufficiently made the case that I had failed in some way or another by not getting ‘to the end’. There were three parts to the dream that stayed with me after waking up: one with Axel carrying a tray of food into a huge dining hall to a place where friends of us were sitting. I told him I had to go to the bathroom and would join him later. Then, in my dreams it is hours later, I am still looking for building F where the bathrooms supposedly are. I am now in the middle of a big city and I can’t find the building as it is not between E and G where I would expect it. I do finally find a large bathhouse, a bit like the Hammam in Istanbul except there is no marble and it is not beautiful old but decrepit old. A lady sits behind the counter and tells me I cannot swim because the pool is cloudy. I can see that from where I stand and re-assure her that I don’t want to swim and am only looking for a bathroom. She points me to their ‘bathroom suites,’ everything for body comfort, but no toilets. I get a call from my friends in the dining hall, where Axel arrived some time ago with my tray, “where are you?”

The last scene is a small rural airport and I am sitting on the grass watching planes land. A large and complex plane with retractable gear and lots of horsepower is coming in for landing and then, on final stretch, it flips up and over, spins around and crashes on the ground. I don’t know what to do and want to walk away. I feel out of my depth with such a tragedy. I notice others don’t have any hesitation and run to the plane, open the door and unstrap the dazed pilot. He is fine and walks out of the crumpled cockpit. That is when I woke up.

The dream explains why I have not written for two days – the dream is about unfinished or incomplete business, but no bodily harm done. I am continuing to make marathon days of more than twelve hours to finish the facilitator materials for our leadership program on a special website before I take of for Tanzania on Saturday evening. These are the notes for my family of facilitators in Ghana, Guyana, Swaziland, Nepal, Iraq, Kenya. There are more, but those are the ones I know. They are the people who are or will be implementing the leadership development programs that my MSH colleagues and I have started. I think that my staying power and unrelenting focus is possible because I see what I am doing as a personal gift to them. I have a picture of them, patiently waiting at the end of the tunnel.

Axel appearing with a food tray in the dream movie is quite apt. If he (or Sita & Jim) would not be preparing meals for me I would live on whatever is heatable and eatable in the refrigerator, as I did yesterday, the same dish for lunch and dinner. Last night everyone was gone to various commitments in Boston and Manchester and I was home alone, moving from one page to the next and the next. Axel found me in exactly the same position as he had left me several hours earlier.

I periodically call my colleague Cary who is the evaluation expert and announce myself on the phone as “The Department of Advanced Studies in the Challenge Model.” She is my co-conspirator and cheerleader. She is the person I call when I run into another little glitch or inconsistency in the models we use and the teaching instructions we have developed for those models. There is nothing like writing teaching instructions – my technical writer friends know all about this. I wouldn’t want to do it for a living – although it seems like I do right now. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing the end users and also knowing the awkwardness of having to teach someone else’ materials and finding that there are some conceptual jumps or gaps and doing this while standing in front of an audience that expects, at least conceptual, flawlessness.

And because of this total and all-encompassing focus on the words on my computer screen I would have missed a most awesome sight yesterday morning if Axel had not commandeered me upstairs to look out of our bedroom window over the cove: crystal clear water and a cerulean blue sky mirroring each other; on the water a gaggle of Canada geese and a flock of smaller black and wide duck-like birds, floating peaceful on the surface. That then was a little sprinkle of beauty over an otherwise black, white and grey computer day.