Sylvia's Journal

I signed Axel and myself up for an introductory Spinning class. Axel might not have considered it but there is strength in numbers. I had always been a little intimidated when I walked by the dimly lit classroom with its cheek-to-jowl stationary bikes, the high pitched teacher exhorting the class to go for the gold and the thump-thump music.

The room was full on the appointed hour early on Saturday. There were others like us, intimidated and waiting for a gentle introduction. All but one of the room full of bikes were occupied. It took about 30 minutes to get us all to figure out the adjustments of the bikes to our bodies and set up and understand the electronics that would provide us with the data points during and after our ride (for monitoring and evaluation purposes).

We spent the remaining 30 minutes biking level, downhill, and uphill with our rides illustrated on an enormous screen (12 connected flat TV screens), showing where we were biking. Sometimes we cruised down or jogged up (standing on the pedals) a paved road in the French or Swiss Alps, sometimes we were on sandy or gravel paths in a national park someplace – scenes that looked vaguely familiar, reminiscent of the beaches at Cape Cod. One ride I thought I recognized, along the coastal path at Sea Ranch in California which we ambled two years ago with our two grandchildren, looking for seals. There are also paths through jungles, over narrow bridges or weaving along pedestrians or hikers. We never stayed consistently on one route which may have confused our well trained brains a bit. But I liked the variation because if you climb up to an Alpine summit it is not only exhausting but the scenery can get a bit boring.

In our artificial and electronic environment everything was possible: the teacher would switch easily from beach to jungle to dunes to daredevil rides down ski slopes, when the interval asked for a different effort. She adjusted the thump-thump music which made me adjust my RPMs. Sometimes there was neither path nor trail and we jumped several yards down rocky outcrops, me on my mountain bike. It helped with the distraction of staying in the green, yellow or red zone displayed on our small monitors. If you go really hard and expending more effort than you have in you, you get a ring of fire first and then you are sucked into a red tunnel – the graphic artists of the bike company had fun creating the screens.

The introductory class lowered my adoption-of-a-new-behavior threshold: this morning at 6AM I was ready for a full hour workout even though I was still a little intimidated for my ride in the big league. Thirty minutes is the most I ever do on the stationary bike in my (home) office. But there is no thump-thump music (I listen to books) and I don’t do any intervals, biking at a comfortable steady pace. I prepared the teacher for the possibility of sneaking out after 30 minutes who said, “no problem as long as you don’t forget to stretch!” But fitness teachers don’t give in to defeat that easily and told me to simply reduce my effort when it got too much. Giving up so easily simply didn’t seem an option anymore.

I am proud to say that I biked up a few steep sloped and reached one summit in the Alps, cruised along some lovely scenery, sometimes at a very high speed. I completed 18.4 miles. Now that I know I can I have made the 6AM Monday morning session a recurrent appointment with myself on my Google calendar.

What is quite an accomplishment for me is nothing for my 70+ year old brother who actually bikes across the Alps on a real bike, for many multiples of 18 miles daily. He has no qualms about bicycling from Holland to Slovenia (over the Alps) or the land of the Basques (over the Pyrenees) and is now dreaming of a trip from Holland to Athens.  I am usually better at long plane rides.

I finally returned to work midweek with an energy that surprised me. During my sick days I had been doing some work, deadlines that couldn’t be relaxed and a few ‘throw ideas around’ kind of meetings. I had felt low in energy but something in my brain was chewing at stuff that circulated in the background.

In the book ‘The Net and the Butterfly’ the authors created one of the most memorable descriptions of the workings of the two different modes of the brain, the Default Network (DN) and the Executive Network (EN). The default network consist of a team of creative types – I would like to hope that my team includes Margaret Sanger, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Florence Nightingale, John Stewart, Amelia Earhart and Leonardo. The energy sucked up by my frontal lobes when my executive function is in charge, dims the lights in the room where my creatives sit, a windowless den deep inside my brain.

When I am asleep or not working on tasks my creative teams is busy, each with their own ideas. Amelia is plotting her next route and thinking about the tradewinds, Leonardo is fixing those hairs of Mona for the umpteenth time, Franklin is looking for sockets to plug in his latest invention, Stewart is watching Fox News for ideas and Jobs is exploring how to get Corning to make indesctructible glass for his new phone.

My executive, when awake but not on task, sometimes makes a visit to the den and finds empty pizza boxes, dirty cups, crumbs on the table, torn napkins with scribbles and pictures that hint at what went on during the night. But most of the time it’s simply and only a mess.  What was missing was a sense of direction for the creatives to work on something together, as a team, and only the EN can provide that.

After I returned to work that direction emerged. Maybe it surfaced when I cleaned up the den. I left instructions on te clean table: when the lights go on, start working on this. I know I can count on each of you to bring your specific talents to the task. I know you can bring attention to currents (AE), detail (LdV), novelty (BF), laser focus (MS), appeal, esthetics (SJ), and absurdity (JS). They did set to work on solving this wicked problem: how can we in the development community help our counterparts who really do want the health system to function at the highest possible levels, to remove all the gunk that keeps it (or them) from doing so.

And so when I arrived back at work I was boiling over with ideas, insights and what if scenarios. I intercepted any person in my cubicle neighborhood who had time to listen to ply my ideas. And as I was talking I refined coarse ideas and even put some in writing. Instead of lamenting how bored I was (I had been before I got sick – a coincidence?) I started calling people, checking out breadcrumbs left by Steve Jobs whose biography I am listening to, and seeing possibilities where I had seen only failures before.

This whole experience reminded me of why being with your nose to the grindstone is not good because you can only see what’s right in front of you. This is why taking a walk in the woods is always a good thing and why we should preserve woods in the first place.

Axel’s loving care, Sita’s herbal concoctions (mullein, ginger, elderberry) and Tessa’s sick tea recipe (lemon, ginger, apple cider, garlic and cayenne), nursed me back to health. I felt good enough for an early morning swim, twice, but that backfired (or something else did) and triggered a bad cold. I was a very unpleasant house mate, coughing my brains out and spitting gunk out of my lungs but the fever was gone. I was grateful for working at a place where it is encouraged to stay at home when sick and discouraged to return prematurely, with plenty of sick leave available to recover at my body’s own pace.

On Sunday we gathered at the house of friends to say farewell to a tree that was filled with memories, insects, furry animals, and viral and/or fungal agents slowly contributing to its demise. It also stood in the way of a solar panel project and thus had to go. There was poetry and storytelling, there was a photo display from long ago, and much touching of the tree as if saying goodbye to a friend on her deathbed.

The next day we walked by the house and there was no trace of the tree – every bit of it was gone. Now the solar panels could march in and take their place on the roof, unimpeded by an old sick tree.

We arrived back in the US on a blue sky day – it is always nice to arrive like that. We went for a long walk to stretch our legs. Little did I know that the flu virus had already nestled inside me. On Thursday I was a bit listless and tired, which I chalked up to jetlag, on Friday I started to feel rotten and on Saturday and Sunday I was sick as a dog with a fever, coughing fits, a headache and all the symptoms that have been listed for this year’s flu season.

I thought I had escaped the virus, thinking because I had had the flu vaccine I would be spared. But no such luck. Axel also didn’t feel so great on Friday night but an 11 hour sleep was all that it took. He was able right away to dive into town affairs by attending various meetings about the new elementary school, and then watching ‘the game’ which apparently the New England team lost – a big deal here, though not so much for me.

Sita and Tessa are cheering me on via Facetime and texts, plying me with all sorts of home remedies, such as a hot lemon brew with ginger, cayenne and garlic, elderberry/flower concoctions, mullein and what not. I am drinking all day long, these and other concoctions, believing in both modern and traditional approaches. I’d like to think I am bit better, though the thermometer still registers a fever.

I am starting to have more energy so I am able to catch up on reading materials that have piled up next to my desk, on my night table and in our living room, but not enough to start a knitting project quite yet.