Sylvia's Journal

I am gently sliding into my vacation. Getting up late, taking my sweet time to get ready for work, a late start to my daily blog entry. I am in this in between state: not quite off from work and not quite on vacation. It is a very sweet period full of promises and prospects. Because the vacation has not started yet, it can also not be used up yet. I want time to stop for awhile tonight. Once the vacation starts it will be over before I know it as there is so much already programmed: a few days with the St. Johns in Small Point in Maine, the funeral trip to Atlanta and a bunch of things to do in the house.

I spent a good part of yesterday removing items from my to-do list and making space in my brain to think through the design of an online course for new leadership facilitators, to test their knowledge and understanding. It wasn’t even on my to-do list but it is something I have wanted to do for a long time. I know I am doing something I like to do when the time flies by without me noticing. It’s called flow, a term coined by Csikzentmihalyi (the psychology of optimal experience) – I think I was in that place for a good part of the day yesterday.

In the evening we went to Ellie who had invited us for a lobster dinner and to show us her magnificent garden in full summer bloom. This is why we had to arrive before it got dark. We did and walked around the 2 acre grounds, fighting off mosquitoes while admiring the Olmsted-esque views.  Although we believe Ellie has some of his genius, as it turned out her small cottage is part of a subdivision of what was once a large estate that was landscaped, indeed, by Olmsted. You can tell from the large trees and the interesting vistas that he had been there.

The lobster, fresh corn and salad we shared with Ellie’s real estate friends and former colleagues who had plenty of stories about local people and their homes, a professional world that is so very different from mine. In between courses we discovered common ground in Small Point and once again that, despite these different spheres we move around in, the world is a small world (or shall I say a small point) after all.

The abundant butter and white wine produced a restless night full of weird dreams. They had some significance upon waking but soon dissolved into thin air with only a few meaningless frames remaining by the time breakfast was served. The lack of exercise yesterday, for both of us, made us wake up stiff and staggering – Axel with back spasms and me with my unabated whiplashed neck. Both of us are wondering whether any of this will ever improve.

I slept in this morning, all the way till 7:30. I am not yet on vacation but decided to work from home till the end of the week when my vacation starts. This requires a very short commute, less than a minute to get down the stairs.  Getting up at 7:30 gives thus gives me plenty of time to wash, eat and write.

I dreamed about technology and teaching. I suspect this was brought on by my conversations with Aman who runs a blog about health, technology and development. I have asked whether I can become a guest blogger and his first response was positive. This was actually on my to-do list for close to a year and Kristen, who put it there, kept sending me these occasional emails asking where I was with that. So I finally bit the bullet and since then Aman and I have been talking by email about how, what and why. I have added the blog to my blog roll so you can check it out. I will be writing about leadership and management in international health and why it is important, my life’s work, so to speak, so the writing should be easy. It is not going to be daily however, as I would have to get up at 4 AM if I were to add another activity to my morning routine.

Yesterday in the office many people were checking off their pre-vacation checklist and frantically meeting and calling to get everything in order before takeoff. When I did not appear on anyone’s checklist anymore I went for a slow row on the Charles River. The weather was perfect and there was only one obnoxious motor boat making waves. I like to row during the middle of the day; I have the boat house to myself, I have a wide choice of boats, and there is little, if any traffic on the river.

The commute home was a killer commute again, 45 minutes to get onto route 1, a distance of less than 5 miles. I though everyone was one vacation and the schools are closed, who are these people? By the time I pulled up to our house I was practically slumped over my steering wheel. Axel came to my rescue, as he is always very solicitous of me in such a state and pointed triumphantly at how far along he was with the meal which included another Mamadou salad, a grilled steak and the final leftovers of the leftover meal.

We went to bed early but not until I had finished Jill Taylor’s stroke book with its message of hope that centered on giving one’s right brain some face time and shutting up the left brain storyteller once in awhile. She makes it sound so easy. I wonder if you have to have had a stroke before you know how to do this. I also abandoned myself to some internet surfing, following the threads about PowerPoint’s 20^th anniversary that stirred the parts of my brain that like to be creative and have fun. If that sounds like a paradox I recommend you check out what David Byrne has done with the software.

The last two mornings it was cold enough that the heater in our house jumped into action and I needed to  blast warm air into my car. This means we are halfway through the summer and have begun the fast slide down towards fall. It is a little depressing as we haven’t even had our usually August heat waves yet. There is much else that we typically do in a (normal) summer that has not happened yet either, like a cookout on the beach, putting out the lobster traps and much more swimming and kayaking.

Yesterday at work consisted of nonstop meetings as everyone is clearing the decks to head out on vacation. This includes me. Part of the deck clearing was preparation for a trip to the Ivory Coast in September that was finally approved. With that I will have hit three official (according to the US government) danger spots in 6 months. I had not realized that the Ivory Coast is still in some state of turbulence (guns on the street as Malcolm told me) because it rarely makes the news here, being part of the French ecosystem and thus not likely to be on our Anglophone screens.

Tessa visited MSH to explore possibilities for an internship with the communications department which would be wise to take advantage of her energy, graphic and organizational skills. Maybe they will. She is looking for ways to learn about her new profession in the workplace before she goes back to school in January, assuming she gets accepted at MassArt or any of the other places she is applying to.

She was home early and had dinner on the table before I returned; for someone who takes her meals at 5:00 AM and at noon this is a rare treat. Everything was familiar from previous days; she had reheated all the leftovers she could find in the refrigerator. It’s the kind of meal I like with small portions of many different things that don’t match but look sort of nice on your plate, like an edible modern art quilt.

After a postprandial walk with Axel, puppy and kids around the loop in the beautiful early evening light, I peeled off leaving them to complete the larger loop without me while I finished my sewing project. Being in a hurry (when you get up as early as I do the evenings are very short) I managed to cut in the wrong places (measure twice cut once) which required additional remedial work. But now all is well again and I am pleased with the result. Axel had a private showing and approved the new outfit, wondering when I plan to wear it; someplace overseas, I responded, and at weddings or other happy dress up events.

And then we started to think, seriously, about going to Linda’s funeral in Atlanta as emails from other relatives came in with their travel plans. Going to Atlanta means missing the family reunion, an old tradition that petered out after the previous generation had mostly disappeared.  Axel had worked hard to bring it back to life in a new format and had invested much psychic energy in the event. We sat for a long time in front of the Delta website with our itinerary on the screen, hesitant to hit the ‘purchase’ button. We agonized about our choice, go or stay, and called in all the forces of the universe to help us decide, including native American medicine cards and Axel’s co-organizer of the reunion. In the end we decided that it was more likely that we would be at the reunion wanting to be at the funeral than being at the funeral wanting to be at the reunion. And so we pressed ‘submit’ and now have two tickets for a trip to Atlanta 10 days from now.

It has been raining for more than 48 hours and everything is damp. The edges of the paper in my office are curling up like they used to do in the hivernage in Senegal. And so, once again I wake up to the drip-drip of rain. I am glad I am not camping someplace in a tent. I have done that already, camping in the rain for an entire week. The rain drags me down.

I went to bed last night in a tender mode because of the acts of three people, one who wrote about her recovery from a stroke, one who was giving his last lecture and has died since, and one who apologized for something that did not need an apology – all the while with Linda’s spirit and her family hovering in the background. Together they twisted into a sort of braid that represented what we are and what we need – sacks of fluid and energy, vibrating in the cosmos with everything else around us, chasing something that can only be obtained at considerable cost, and reach it only with the help of others. So there!  It takes accidents and mishaps to find out who’s there for us. It also takes pauses that we cannot impose on ourselves to quiet, for a time, this chatterbox brain full of ‘should’s and ‘ought to’s and move into a slow place where we can observe the world that is otherwise racing by us, bombarding us with energies that we cannot possible pay attention to, even though we try.

Axel was in this place a little longer than I was in the immediate post crash days.  I do remember when the world shriveled up to contain just me and my side of the hospital room and hold the visitors and caregivers, while I was kept in a chemically induced state of bliss. Within days I took this small world as a negative, a restraining situation that needed to be altered. The state of bliss had been fleeting even though I held onto the chemicals for a few more weeks (I remember wondering what the big deal about oxycontin was until I stopped taking it but it never was about bliss, just dulling the pain).

Now my world is as vast as the entire globe again. I am connected to events and places as much as I want to be. I am buzzing with energy and to-do-lists to which to apply my energy but the connective tissue with people is stretched and thin. The three voices from last night were a reminder that some things deserve priority. I long for my vacation that will start next week. In my mind I am already sitting outside overlooking the ocean in Maine with my water color set in front of me and a pile of books next to me and spending countless hours walking and talking with dear friends and each other.

Less than 3 years ago we attended a joyful event in Western Massachusetts when Axel’s cousin Erik and his wife Linda celebrated their daughter Ingrid’s graduation from Hampshire College.  A year later Erik, who was my age, died unexpectedly from a postoperative infection and yesterday we got news that Linda died of breast cancer after a fast and steep decline in her health over the last couple of months. I have been thinking much of Linda lately, and of her two children Todd and Ingrid, and how everything turned out so different in such a short time. The news left us both very sad last night. One day you are blissfully unaware of your own health and then suddenly everything changes. We were lucky to return from the edge and to be back, fully, in life and expecting many more years; for Linda and Erik and their kids things turned out so differently.

This morning, up early again, the first thing I did was break a glass as I was cleaning out the sink. I am not sure whether glass shards bring luck here but in Holland they supposedly do. I don’t need any shards to bring me luck because I already feel very lucky. The shards this morning did not make me feel lucky; in fact, they reminded me of the sharp pains that I know are being experienced in the community that is mourning Linda’s death.

I heard more stories like this, unexpected down turns, surprises, accidents, in the closing minutes of our Quaker meeting when Friends ask each other to hold so and so in the Light. And yet, in the silence that followed, I felt like a wave of bliss washed over me. I could have sat there for hours. It was as if I was in a tiny glass-encased Nirvana while grief and sadness was held at bay, within reach but separated by these glass walls, brittle and sturdy at the same time. And now this glass breaking…something about glass this morning, today…

I am learning much about the right and left brain’s effect on us by reading the story of Jill Taylor who documents her own stroke in a wonderful book called Stroke of Insight. I realize that some of those moments of bliss and feeling disconnected from the material world are when the right brain takes over and overrides the always chattering left brain that has us tied to the ground by a million little wires, like Gulliver. Unfortunately the moments are fleeting (when you don’t have a left hemisphere stroke like she did) and the left brain is never off duty for very long. Since there is much work to be done, this is probably a good thing, for now.