Sylvia's Journal

We are staying with the daughter and son in law of a dear longtime friend who is hosting our reunion in San Diego. The house has a pool that covers the entire backyard. We are warmly welcomed and take a daily dip in the grand pool. The temperature of both air and pool is perfect – the latter a far cry from the glacial waters of Lobster Cove.

We drove up into the mountains to visit our host’s friends from their Peacecorps days in Ghana. When they returned from Ghana they bought a mountain and started an avocado farm that now produces 100s of thousands of avocados each year. They flattened the top of the mountain and built a dream house with 360 degree views, an enormous veranda with a pool, a hot tub and shaded places to eat and far niente.

All 10 of us descended on the place and were warmly welcomed as if old friends all of us. It was a case of my friends are your friends. We the wonderful Mexican food we picked up along the way, and sat around the table telling stories, serious and silly. We learned a bit about avocado farming and farm help and unavoidably drifted into immigration issues without getting too much into current affairs and our perpetrator in chief (PIC) as he who shall not be named is referred to by some. After that it was pool time, and stretching out in sun and the dry mountain air.

We returned to our various lodging places, tried out a fast food fish taco place in Rancho Bernardino where the tacos were delicious and the beer was cheap. En passant we bought a case of various summer wines to accompany our home cooked Moroccan dinner tonight that will precede the AGM – the official reason for our trip to SD. And today, apart from giving a helping hand to the cook, we are free and taking a trip to La Jolla.

Last Monday, after a busy morning of working on various tasks of Sylvia Inc. I went on a shopping spree at the mall. I used to work from home on Mondays and couldn’t shake the belief that I was playing hooky. I have gotten used to not having to get up early in the morning, but I haven’t gotten used to not having to be at my desk – and since I had been most of the time, it felt wrong to be going to the mall doing working hours. I still have to shed that part of my past life. 

Axel returned from a week in Seattle on the red eye. Within 24 hours he was back on the plane, this time with me, to the west coast for a week vacation in San Diego. I was so ready for a vacation after a week of nearly 8 hour work days.  For he first time ever I used my free companion ticket, compliments of American Express. We got upgraded to first class on the first leg of our trip, to Salt Lake City, and are still in good seats for the second part. 

We are off to the now annual Zugsmith reunion – for the first time on the other coast. Most of us are now retired and can afford to fly to faraway places, if not because of a good retirement arrangement, then at least because of all the miles we have all flown over the years during our international development careers. The ZS Society, as we refer to ourselves, consists of a group of colleagues who started working at the same place more than 35 years ago. I was only there for 8 months, but others for their entire career; some of them switched to MSH and we were reunited again, there went on to other organizations, but we all stayed in touch. 

For a brief moment each year we come together for the Annual General Assembly, the AGM, of our society and act as if we are decades younger – we are silly, talk silly, make up stuff, and enjoy each others’ loving and laughing company. It is a most wonderful group of people and worth getting up at 3:15AM for to catch our early flight west.

I wrote on my Skype profile: free as a bird at Lobster Cove. But this week I have been all but free as a bird – and only took my meals overlooking Lobster Cove. For the rest I was chugging away at tasks that other organizations have specialists for: drawing up contracts, writing proposals, getting a business certificate, opening a bank account, managing my retirement funds, organizing receipts and invoicing, checking the new business cards, populating my website, learning new software, organizing my calendar for next week, cleaning my inbox, and organizing my thoughts about work done in Chapel Hill last week. This is the new reality of Sylvia Inc.

Someone said, maybe you should go back to work – but I couldn’t, even if I was offered a position. I am now in a universe that is so much bigger and grander than the universe of my last 32 years. If I was a medium sized fish in a small pond, I am now swimming in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans – a little minnow, seeing all the stuff that is going on, the work that is needed… the possibilities are endless.

Now, taking my lunch at my favorite spot overlooking the water, three little barn swallows are showing me what it really means to be free as a bird. It is as if they have come to remind me, or maybe teach me something about freedom. 

I watch them as they perform their acrobatics – high up, swooping down, circling back, but always doing this right in front of me. Of all the space they could use they remain right in front of me. They are joyful little creatures. If they do this because their dinner is also doing acrobatics, these insects must be tiny as there are none to be seen from my vantage point, and it is hot, the middle of the day, when most of the insects are quiet. So, joyfulness it is.

They remind me of the aerobatics I have seen pilots do in their single propeller planes: going straight up until they stall and then spiraling back down to earth. At one time I had some desire to learn how to do that but the crash put an end to those aspirations.

And then, just as suddenly as they appeared they are gone. It is as if they know the lesson has been received and written down. Free as a bird requires some luck (which I have and have had), some intention, and discipline and an occasional reminder from the gurus, human or animal.

Incidentally, and probably not coincidentally with all these thoughts about flying, today it is exactly 11 yeas ago that we fell out of the sky, and lived to tell the story. Maybe that is what the barn swallows were celebrating – life itself!

This morning I listed to a podcast (On Being) during which Krista Tippett interviewed Lyndsey Stonebridge, a British literary historian who has immersed herself in the works of Hannah Arendt. Arendt was a German-born politic theorist and philosopher who lived thirteen years as a stateless person, not wanted anywhere until she became an American citizen in 1950. Her books (The banality of Evil, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition among others) have practically risen to bestseller status with the changes of the political landscapes around the world.

One phrase from the interview resonated deeply with me as they talked about bridging divides in worldview. The phrase is an antidote to the general lamenting that is either dominating the news or triggered by the news (in any form). That phrase is: “…and still…”. It is a poetic line, probably used in many poems, but I see its usefulness in daily life. First of all, in my own daily life, as in “My position at my longtime employer has been terminated…and still…there is work for me to be done.”  And then there are the bombs in Afghanistan, exploding regularly, and still, there are activists and there is good work being done, and people shop and go to the market and celebrate whatever blessings come their way. 

It is a useful sentence to spin people’s attention away from all the dark and evil and hopelessness that the media present us with, or maybe the dynamics in our family, our team, our organization…and still, something has life in it, people have, something is trying to alter things, people are, trying to bring the world back into balance in a million small ways.

A related idea, coined by Arendt, is  the“talking across banisters.” I had an encounter where I could have, but did not, talk across the bannister. It is an experience that keeps haunting me. I had all my buttons pressed by this other person (of course I was the one carrying all those buttons that beckoned ‘push me, push me!)  I lost my good self in a defense/attack routine that I am still ashamed off. I have come to realize since then that I let the limbic part of the brain take control away from my reasonable self (the prefrontal cortex). I went into that  the part that decides in milliseconds that the other is friend or foe, and, as scripted over many millennia, entered into a useless verbal fight. Ughh…and still…

I completed the first part of my first consulting assignment, two days in Chapel Hill (NC) with more trips to follow. It was a fast paced schedule that required an early rise like the old commuting days, followed by a flight to Raleigh/Durham, a full day of work, transcribing notes in the evening after a boring dinner in a boring restaurant of a boring hotel. Welcome to consulting, I hear Axel say.

But it was an interesting assignment that is right up my alley – a discovery trip to get at people’s perceptions of what is happening and what needs to happen as an organizational transformation unfolds. I get to draw on all my training  and relationships that have led me to this place and this assignment at this time. 

One person I interviewed I had last seen when I came in for a debriefing at USAID in Burkina Faso, more than two and a half decades ago. Others were more recent (ex) colleagues from MSH. 

We are all twirling around in one big pot – when fortunes are up in one part of this ecosystem people drift over there, away from the less fortunate elements but the balance tilts and people drift elsewhere again, or back – I am sure that is MSH’s hope as new projects are added to the portfolio and more hands are needed on deck.

I interviewed some people who had done the rounds and served with many of the key actors in the global health space. Having worked for s long with one organization it was interesting, and not surprising, how much we have all in common and how much we are all struggling with some of the same issues, including our over dependence on the US government. Although stable as governments go, it is always influenced by the prevailing political winds. The current winds are not blowing in the same direction as the global health priorities the rest of the world deems important. May be, in some paradoxical way, I a both a casualty and a beneficiary of this circumstance.