Sylvia's Journal

I was up in the middle of the night trying to arrange Axel’s flight back that would match mine, now that his passport was returned (mine not yet but on its way). If ever I needed to travel with my best friend it is now. Some people said, why, he can just take another route. But they don’t understand the extent to which I need him by my side now, all the time.

But the flights that were available yesterday were not in the middle of the night and I panicked. A nice Delta gentleman helped me out and was able to find exactly what I was looking for. When I woke up in the morning I discovered that my own ticket was bought for another route. More panic, more rushes of adrenaline, emails, phone calls, and finally peace. Everything is settled now. We are flying together back home.

When you are stressed out it is hard to exit. I could hear people think, com’on, snap out of it. The problem with stress and depression is that you cannot. It was a good reminder about one of the real tragedies of Afghanistan, namely that millions of people are stressed and traumatized. If my relatively small stresses affected my functioning in such elementary ways, one can wonder about those who are traumatized. I think life throws us these life lessons, so we can be better helpers, listeners. I know the acts of others towards me in this last week that were helpful and those that weren’t. And I certainly remember those that added to my stress.

I went to a session about Managing as Designing Activity that helped me get out of my funk. The trigger sentence was this: design invites collaboration and invites possibilities. Design is about ‘how can we make this reality happen, together?’ It was the magic phrase that lifted the clouds and provided the door through which I could get out of my fog. The opposite is ‘Managing as Problem Solving activity’ that is about constraints and limiting views. I had gotten a hint about that yesterday during my own presentation but I wasn’t able to pick it up then. Now I was.

As part of the session we were sent outside to scout the magnificent UNM campus for design principles: rhythm, balance, contrast, variety, patterns and then use what we saw to reframe our management challenges.

When I left the classroom I saw a small hummingbird. Years ago a Native American woman identified the hummingbird as my totem. I don’t get to see it very often, certainly not in Afghanistan, but it has shown up in times of crisis and stress, and so it did today. Hummingbirds are about joy, an element that had been rather absent since I landed a week ago. Some benevolent force in the universe sent it my way.

In rather inexplicable ways the hummingbird let me to a Rumi poem that had a few lines that resonated deeply – I am excited to go back to studying my Dari so that one day I can read Rumi in his own language:

[…]
Be with those who help your being
Don’t sit with indifferent people, whose breath
Comes cold out of their mouths
Not these visible forms, your work is deeper
[…]