Sylvia's Journal

There are three mindsets that seem particularly important to cultivate these days: curiosity, imagination and doubt. 

I use this in my coaching and for myself. All three came into play as I was reading, or rather listening to, Lisa Feldman Barret’s book about how our emotions are constructed. I had to appeal to all three mindsets in order to finish the book, more than 11 hours of audio. Now I am going to read the book all over again. She has shaken many of my beliefs; doubting things I took for granted, curiously asking questions (what about this, and that?) and imagining what my new insights can make possible.

I have this fantasy of calling her up (she lives nearby) and proposing we meet over coffee, somewhere in Cambridge, so I can ask her all those questions that popped into my head while listening. 

And while I was still digesting that I prepared for my challenging assignment, my first ever Zoom workshop, across 7 time zones and in French. 

I explored platforms that could be integrated into my workshop to co-develop strategies and analyses. I tried Mural and Mirro but they were too complicated, at least for me, now. I’d have to feel more confident before I dare introducing them in workshops. Besides, there is a bandwidth issue. Google’s Jamboard was more promising, because of its simplicity but even that was finally discarded – too many moving pieces and too many possibilities for confusion. I have to remember that online workshops are still new to most people, and I was already introducing one platform (Zoom) and one working document (Google Presentations).

I was blessed with a very knowledgeable counterpart who basically ran the first day while I was holding the Chat space and admitting people who got kicked out of the meeting because of bandwidth. Not all were able to put their videos on, but what a difference that made. Apparently people aren’t used to show their faced on such video calls – but it turns out to be as much about bandwidth as it is about habit (and hesitance to give people a glimpse in their home life?).

Tomorrow we’ll do another three-day workshop, now with three times as many people. I imagine how that will go, am curious about what is and what is not possible, in French, across timezones, and with feeble internet connections for some. So it’s a new adventure, though not as anxiety-provoking as last week’s. Now it’s a fun adventure, with everyone, including myself, in deep learning mode (open mind, patience, humor) while accomplishing some important tasks, and continuing to cultivate our collective curiosity, imagination sprinkled with a small dose of doubt.

This morning I skipped our Zoom Quaker meeting. A New York Times piece explores whether it is possible to be worshipping and communing with God via your computer screen. No one in their right mind would have asked that question even a short 4 months ago.

Today I didn’t feel like communing with God over Zoom. I have work to do (countless Zoom hours ahead for the next few weeks). It is work that keeps my mind on edge: three consecutive virtual workshops, in French, across 7 time-zones, with a repeat every week for 3 weeks, starting tomorrow. I have worked hard to contain my anxiety. What helped a great deal is that I am paired up with a very knowledgeable facilitator in Madagascar. Our preparations together are reducing both our anxieties. I am actually starting to look forward to our first event tomorrow, rather than dreading it.

Taking a break from the work, and sitting in front of my computer, Axel and I sat in the warm sun, drinking coffee, watching the newly planted Cranberry beans pulling their tiny little heads out of the small peat containers, and practicing our guitar and ukulele chords so we can improvise together. New life, warmth, beauty, harmony are here with us, if you have the ability notice.

At the same time, we cannot forget the global pickle we are in. The front page of the New York Times reminds us of the 100,000 deaths so far in the US by printing names, ages and one liners about the person behind the small entry in this register of deaths: a small sample, one tenth of one percent of all those whose lives were cut short. 

I learned that we cannot hold two thoughts in our mind at the same time (think milliseconds) – but in a slightly longer time span (seconds, minutes, hours, days), may be we can make sure that we don’t forget to notice what’s good, what’s beuatiful and what’s right, and let these inform our actions, for ourselves, our families and our world.

I have a new stretch assignment that requires me to work remotely with a team in a country 7 time zones ahead of me and in French, with very little time to prepare. I have worked in this country before and with some of the people involved. I compare my current experience with that of some years ago. Then I did not need a contract, since I was employed and these were my colleagues. I would read up in the week leading up to the assignment, get my ticket, get on a plane, travel through the 7 time zones, land, get to my hotel and have a few days to connect with old and new colleagues, get the lay of the land, prepare the workshop and off we go. The project would have been billed for at least 14 days of my time, plus overhead; an expensive but common proposition. That’s why I have over 2 million miles on Delta.

Now all this has to be done by Google Meet or Zoom, Google docs and comments, a series of iterations and then trust that we can pull it off next week, it being a series of three mini workshops conducted using Zoom and Google’s Jamboard.

It’s all very new and somewhat nerve racking. I am in full experimentation mode, as many of us are now in this new world of virtual everythings.

I gave myself a crash course in Mural, Miro and Jamboards and landed on Google’s Jamboards. Not the most sophisticated but the simplest of them all requiring the least amount of band width. Band with is an issue, especially when we start to descent from the central (capital) level to the periphery (regions, districts). It is clear that the work will have to be done by the local team. For one, they are in the same time zone, and also because they know the context so much better than I do.

This is also happening in other far away countries I work in, where I am asked to connect locals to locals, local resources that can do the work I do in ways that are better and cheaper. I think the current crisis is teaching everyone that there are alternatives to the classic model of experts in the US or Europe, flying in, being put up in a hotel, workshops in hotels. The alternatives are cheaper, more cost effective and probably just as good, with a light touch from the experts far away, if at all.  This is how it should be, should have been for a long time. But there are interests at stake, the (expensive) experts who need to be paid, the organization replenishing its overhead kitty by sending these experts out. The US taxpayers footing the bill. The new order is an awakening: we can do more for less.

If we pull off next weeks’ assignments, producing intended outcomes, this will prove that I have worked myself out of a job. I am glad I am at the end, and not the beginning, of my international public health career. I see less and less use of people like me, and more value being given to local experts. 

But for now, I am a little nervous and asking myself, can I pull this off? Can I handle Zoom and Jamboards and glitches and time zones and Zoom fatigue all at the same time, and all that in French?

The crows have always been here, at least for the last 150 years. We know this from a center page engraving in Harper’s Weekly (August 6, 1887). It features a ‘murder’ (yes, that’s the collective noun!) of crows circling over Lobster Cove. It was drawn by Harry Fenn in a series called ‘Around Cape Ann.’ The offspring (we’d like think) of those crows are still here.

About five years ago, many of the crows were killed by the West Nile Virus. We found their bodies all over the place, and dutifully reported the dead beasts. But it didn’t kill all of them.

Lately I watched as the crow population has not only surged, but the beasts seem larger than usual, and more aggressive. They are dive-bombing and hassling the squirrels in ways I cannot remember. I was wondering whether this is what happens when you lose many members of your species after a virus has ravaged the population. 

The ones we see now survived the onslaught, as their average lifespan is about 13 years or so.  Are they stronger than the lost family members? Darwin would say yes. Were they also more aggressive? My own eyes tell me yes.

And now it is our turn. I wonder if the crows are watching us, and in their own caw-caw language contemplate what they see below them, and ask themselves questions like, how will these humans emerge from their virus episode? Will their survivors be stronger, like us? Will they be more aggressive, like us?

I think they’d be wrong. I have seen so many instances of generosity, from companies to their customers, from total strangers to total strangers, from all those critical workers to their fellow citizens. It’s true I have also seen instances of aggression that I could not have imagined when the crows started dying, but these are far outnumbered by the acts of goodness and generosity.

I’d like to think that we are not at all like crows.

In the introduction to the 2009 edition of his book ‘Theory U’ Otto Scharmer writes, “Because our thin crust of order and stability could blow up at any time, now is the moment to pause and become aware of what’s rising from the rubble.” The reference to ‘rising from the rubble..’ comes from Vaclav Havel’s Liberty Medal acceptance speech at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (4 July 1994): “I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble.”

So, here we are, 26 years after Havel said those words, and 10 years after Scharmer wrote his. The thin crust has blown up and we are now in this strange new world, wading into the rubble of the old. 

As we hear other people’s perspectives on COVID-19 and the new world it has created for us, I see people on a spectrum that range from “this is nothing more than a very bad case of the ordinary flu!” (expressed by the guys who cut our neighbors lawn, who don’t wear masks or gloves), to “things will never be the same again” (as predicted by many scientists, economists, finance people, and me, all masked and gloved).

The SARS-CoV2 virus, in all its cleverness and tinyness, has accomplished in just a few months what the most brilliant, enlightened, farsighted and imaginative people failed to do since the second world war: getting people out of their boxes and reinvent how to live together on this planet in ways that are sustainable and leave no one behind.

Until just a few months ago plenty of people (at least among those who had the ability and resources to do so) had no interest in changing the way they worked. Now we are collectively doing it, even though some do it kicking and screaming. The people who will weather this storm are the ones who were prepared and saw this coming. Or those who may not have seen this coming, who are nevertheless able to see silver linings (no more commutes, more quality time with the kids, more freedom, no disruptions from bored or gossipy colleagues), and possibilities for the future.

As we now know for sure, we were never very imaginative about our future. We simply extrapolated from the past and present, with minor tweaks. The people who didn’t believe in online education kept on expanding their campuses with more real estate, upping their tuitions to pay for it all and hitting their wealthy alumns for never big enough endowments in an ever rising spiral. And now it’s ‘poof’ time.

In 1911 the Scottish naturalist John Muir wrote in his book My First Summer in the Sierra, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitches to everything in the universe.” I always thought this was about nature and the universe, but now I see it is also about our supply chains: Vietnamese factories cannot make an important export product (clothing) because they can’t get the buttons which come from China where the factory that made them is closed because the workers went home to be with their families and, even though they are now open, they cannot staff them because for them too, everything hitches to other parts of the supply chain, whether human or material.  It’s Poof time on a grand scale

I am reading a book about how emotions are constructed that has pulled the foundations of what I knew from underneath me. The book is challenging everything I knew to be true about the universality of emotions. It has me look back, with some embarrassment, to things I did in the past few decades during workshops in various African and Asian countries, testing people’s abilities to become more ’emotionally intelligent,’ and learn to recognize and name the inner emotional states of others based on, allegedly, universal facial expressions. 

There was the assumption that the major 5 or 6 major emotional states (happy, sad, angry, disgusted, surprised, etc.) were the same everywhere in the world. Now I learn that the American psychologists who invented and then replicated the experimental designs that led to the conclusion of universality of emotions were wrong. Once the American/western biases were removed from the experimental methods, the author and her research assistants were not able to replicate the results, not once, not twice, not any time.

As I was listening to the scientist explaining why she first came to question the initial hypothesis of the universality of emotions, and then developed a new theory, I found myself arguing with the methods and conclusions that dismissed the old theory. And then I caught myself. I was not quite willing to let go of something that I had taken for truth. Such things are painful. But then I realized that this new theory did explain something that for decades had not made sense to me: why was it that people in Ouidah (Benin) who consider the Python a sacred animal were not scared the way I was of that animal. The snakes even curled around the rafters in people’s houses according to the temple master (who then curled an enormous snake around my neck like a shawl).

My beliefs about the universality of human emotions have, until now, informed the stories I am telling myself and others about emotions and feelings. [By the way, if you Google ‘what is the difference between emotions and feelings?’ you will find the very first few entries contradicting each other – this should have given me a hint!]

Once I got over my initial indignation (‘how does she dare to question my Truth!’), and listened a bit more carefully as she explained her new theory of ‘constructed emotions,’ I realized I had much to learn from this cognitive neuroscientist who knew a whole lot more than I did about how our brains work. The annoyance stemmed from having to admit to myself that what I thought I knew something about, I actually knew very little about. A setback, this late in life!

My  attitude of ‘I-know-this-for-sure’ has been challenged consistently these last 2 months. The things I learned about COVID-19 from, what I considered credible sources, turned out to be on shaky grounds, each truth being superseded by newer truths at regular intervals. What I (and so many others) thought to be ‘for sure’ about the virus has consistently been superseded. In the beginning of March I still thought:

• It’s just like the flu
• It’s only dangerous for old and fragile people
• If you are not showing symptoms you are not sick
• You can’t pass it on if you are not sick/don’t have symptoms
• As long as you cough and sneeze into your elbow you are good
• The virus can’t live outside the body
• Small kids and young people aren’t at risk
• We just have to social distance for a while and then we can go back to normal, etc.

Looking back there are so many things that, had I known, I might have done differently, done more of or less of. The same is probably true for millions of other people like me. Had we known ‘for sure’ – we probably wouldn’t have been in the pickle we are in now.

It goes to show how hard it is for (real) scientists to actually know something for sure (I am not including fake scientists who cherrypick their data). Even if scientists claim that something is for real, their assertions depend entirely on how they go about testing their theories. This leaves me with the question, how do we ever know ‘for-sure?’

For more than 2 decades we have kept our lives organized using what now seems an old fashioned appointment book. Every year in October I order the new Anselm Adams engagement book. This is our favorite, not just because of the wonderful pictures of the American landscape but also because of the way it is laid out. From October to December we have two books going. And then, in January we relegate the old one to a box with other memorabilia. We have kept them there mostly out of nostalgia for things past. It holds another year of our life. Sometimes we go back into that box to help us refresh our memories about something we have done in the past.  

Now, the calendar is like a wasteland, sitting unused on the counter with page after page of whiteness. The March weeks still have a number of entries, and then it is blank, except for the occasional things I planned month in advance, like our trip to Holland in April, a trip to a friend’s wedding in May, and some other gatherings that required travel and advance bookings.

Gone are the appointments for doctor, PT, massage and dentist visits, dinners with friends, concerts, plays, lectures, etc.  If this calendar is kept with the old ones in a box and no one throws it away after we are gone, it may tell a story of idleness, of nothingness.

But of course, nothing is further from the truth. We are very busy but everything is now only marked on our electronic calendars. For years we struggled to keep the atom and byte calendars synchronized, with mixed success. Now that problem has gone away. We don’t have to chide or blame each other for not marking something in the appointment book and missing an appointment that required payment for the no-show. This is one of the many layers of the new abnormal that is revealing itself to us. More to come, no doubt.

Some weeks ago, I decided to offer complimentary services to teams that are now working in a high stress new normal. I made the offer to ex-colleagues who have moved on to other places of work and now are members of teams that don’t have a lot of practice talking about their feelings. I have done five sessions since then with four different teams working in the private for-profit sector, the private non-profit sector and the public sector.

As with any move we make towards others, they may not be entirely altruistic. In my offer were also some more self-serving motives.

For one, knowing that team coaching is on the rise, I figured that these experiences would give me something to experience and learn from, and I did. I am a member of a team coaching network that gets together periodically. The experiences gave me something to bring into the conversations.  With that, the selfish turned back into altruistic.

I also reasoned that, if the teams appreciated these sessions, maybe they would hire me in the future. In fact, one did offer to pay me but I declined, at least for now. Still, there is this hope.

I know in my reasoned brain that real thankfulness and gratitude do not require a response, but the brain cells in my heart keep jumping up and down waiting for that gushing response, oh, that was wonderful what you did, we want more of that (so I can be more generous again). 

But the reactions didn’t come, not positive, not negative, just none. And in that nothingness I find myself wanting. Any feedback, even if the session was a waste of time, is better than my guessing, which leaves nothing to learn or improve.  The vacuum leaves too much room for making up stories.

I am coaching someone who is missing feedback from her peers and boss about her performance and they way she works in the team, her style, but there is none. I can so empathize with her now. Some of my teachers would say, well, there you go, this experience needed to be experienced by you to be a better coach. I hope so.

I just deleted from my calendar the last vestige of our planned vacation in Holland, the return trip from Tessa from London which would have been done using my Delta miles. Now all signs of this event happening are gone. Hopefully we can do this a year from now.

We broke our isolation seal by having Sita and her family over for the weekend. Saffi, our 4 year old granddaughter gave us the longest real hugs ever. The one we had all been longing for. 

The weather was on our side. We spent much time on our beach, which had been cordoned off by the police, but we had our own access and ignored it. From time to time the police car would drive by and, using a bull horn to tell people to get off the beach.

There was a wide assortment of people on the beach: some family pods, some teenage pods (without masks) and some lonely adults. I think what we had all had in common, was the need to break away and inhale the fresh clean lobster cove air. It was too cold to swim, although some people did don bathing suits, ran in quickly, dipped below the surface and ran out. We stood by the side and applauded them. I don’t think I have ever swum in our cove before late June.

It was so nice to be together for a short while, as if nothing had changed. But of course, everything has changed and so we enjoy the time we have together doubly. Pure joy!

Here’s some perspective taking – a useful technique I learned in my coach training, that was triggered by the comparison of the number of deaths (in the US) due to COVID-19 and deaths during the entire Vietnam war. At this first week of May 2020 it is about the same, 58,000 or so. It made me think about other parts of that comparison that may be true as well (recognizing that 60 years ago we were in a man-made catastrophe, a little different from this force of nature that has hit us now): 

At a societal level:

• people were anxious and angry
• when your number came up, you could lose your life
• a generational divide about how to act, what to do or not to do, accompanied by estrangement within families based on one’s views
• an economic recession
• a deep polarization in society.

At a (geo)political level there were then, and still are now, some things that are eerily similar:

• a president considered incompetent by many
• officials at the highest levels lying through their teeth
• fierce battles between the White House and the so-called liberal media
• a cry to battle competitors to the ‘America First’ position (USSR then, China now)
• reluctance if not outright obstruction to the strategy of ‘tax and spend’ to help citizens traverse the turbulence
• election strategies focused on disenfranchising those who don’t support the president’s agenda 
• open warfare between the White House and Capitol Hill. 

And finally, there are the historical wounds that do not want to go away and that are still releasing pus:

• state rights versus federal rights
• vengefulness due to forced desegregation and all the other judgments about the denizens of ‘the (elitist) north’ and ‘the common (white) men of the south.’.

And then there is the long hair – this time not a statement about one’s political philosophy but rather a result of the closing of barbers and hair salons.

Here is a little tidbit culled from the archives of the House of Representative. With some minor changes in words and names, it was easy for me to see that we are not entirely on unfamiliar grounds. 

The 91st Congress (1969–1971) faced several daunting challenges: an unpopular war in Vietnam, race riots in the cities, a rising crime rate, and an economic recession. College campuses erupted in protest when President Richard Nixon ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia and escalated the Vietnam War. Congress defeated the President’s attempt to change welfare policy, and rejected two of Nixon’s nominees to the Supreme Court. As animosity mounted between the White House and Capitol Hill, Congress reorganized itself in 1970 to foster transparency with new voting rules, a new budget process, and a more professional staff. (source)

We have made it through that time half a century ago. We will make it again through this one. And maybe, 60 years from now, people will look back at this time as a period that created the most amazing music, and the teenagers then wished they hadn’t missed it.

History, and life, consist of cycles, with suffering and wonderment traipsing rigth alongside each other.