Sylvia's Journal

Sunday evening we started with a WorldCafe-ish introduction to the two day event organized by my pharmaceutical colleagues about medicines in Universal Health Care. Sita was hired to capture the conversation on a 16 foot knowledge wall, which she did in her usual awe-inspiring way.

Axel checked in with us at the end of each day, seeing the progress in Sita’s scribing and gauging the progress of the meeting by the level of energy in the room. He met colleagues from Ghana, Ethiopia and Bangladesh – the fact that he was Sita’s dad helped with the introductions.

The joy of working with Sita is that we get to have all our meals together. On Sunday we ate Lebanese (Kebabji), on Monday we ate at Kramer’s bookstore café and tonight we ate at a greasy airport joint, bringing to an end this intense workweek for me and an friends-and-art vacation for Axel.

On the way to the airport, while Axel was deeply engaged in conversation with the taxi driver, Sita knitted this experience together with all her other scribing events, reflecting on what she learned in others and/or missed in this one. Sita is better schooled in system dynamics by now than I am. By putting one and one and one together she is intensely aware of the messes that people have created by thinking in a certain way and is dismayed when she sees similar thinking, intended to end the messes, create more of the same. It is why Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem out of the same consciousness that created the problems in the first place. But we do.

She is seeing the cataclysmic events or trends from the last years (Katrina, Sandy, tornadoes in Oklahoma, violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, and the rise of chronic diseases, missing mussels in Lobster Cove) not as exceptions and rare and disruptive occurrences, but as the new normal. Where I am still thinking of black swans, she quoted someone present at the World Economic Forum as saying, “these are large blinking neon swans.” If we choose to ignore them we do so at our own risk and peril. Afghanistan, New Orleans, Oklahoma, Syria, the morbidly obese and the Jersey shore or far away from Lobster Cove but it could be different.

Pondering all this I flew home while listening to Ludovico Eunaudi’s Divinire and reading about Gloucester and Charles Olson. The combination of sound and word made me want to write poetry, seeing hope and possibility behind this veil of worry, concern and pessimism (“no,” says Sita, “realism”). But there is no chance of that. I was distracted by the fish, chips and tartar sauce sloshing around in my unsuspecting belly, and in thousands of other bellies. There is some digesting to be done before figuring out what to do next (and before my cholesterol check blood test tomorrow).