Sylvia's Journal

If there is a wolf (or dog or other animal) with two heads that shows up in your life, which head are you feeding? The good one or the bad (evil) one? The image of such a two headed creature pops up in many old stories, legends, fairytales, of whih I have been reading a lot lately. I have become quite aware of when others are feeding the wrong head but maybe not so much when I do it (to) myself. I pull away from conversations that spoon the broth into the wrong head, an allergic mental reaction. 

I just finished a young adult book (Darius the great is not okay by Adib Khorram) that a friend passed on to me. The book is about a high school boy of mixed Iranian/American parentage who is depressed and take medication for his depression. The book took me into his head where I found him feeding the head of the two headed wolf that produced ever greater feelings of victimization, sadness, not fitting in at school and not being loved, especially not by his father. A trip to his mother’s family and ailing grandfather in Iran leads to a friendship with a neighborhood boy of his own age. The trip puts things in perspective when he is forced to see beyond himself and witnesses the pain and sadness of others.  I didn’t like the book. I felt I was the wrong audience (not a young boy, not of mixed parentage and not depressed) until I read the author’s note of why he wrote the book, reminding me that the book is about depression and how the world reacts to depressed people – exactly as I did while reading the book (wanting to sit the boy down and give him a good shake). So maybe the book was for me, after all.

I have joined the yearly peppy and upbeat monthlong series of webinars about energy leadership, a program I took nearly a decade ago, which launched me into my coaching career. The program was transformative in that it gave me a framework and language around the energetic pull of people and circumstances (even weather). Catabolic energy pulls one down into a spiral of anger at others and feeling victimized by circumstances. Anabolic energy pulls one’s energy up into ever higher reaches of energy until one reaches the ‘One with the Universe’ realm. The webinar series is run by the peppiest of peppiest young (highly anabolic) women. I watched her with great admiration as she interviewed three other peppy women, also in their 30s) who have created businesses and good incomes that help people channel their energies in the right direction. I am in awe, thinking of how and who I was at that age. Not anabolic like that, more catabolic like the boy in the book (I have journals to prove this).

Last night we spoke with our daughter and her husband who have just returned from a one month Airstream trip down south. They left to take a break from the sadness of having to put their first and dearly loved 14 year old dog to sleep and being in a house with too many memories. She is not clear about whether the trip helped her to cope with the loss. Our facetime conversation made me wonder. There was much of that catabolic energy. I had a strong reaction, maybe it is a kind of self-preservation, trying to withstand the pull that such energy has on me. I saw which head was being fed. The best medicine for me was to remove myself from that downward pull (all this against the background of an entire day of grey skies and incessant rain). I went to bed and lost myself in a 1024 piece electronic puzzle of a picture full of flowers and loveliness. 

I am listening to Angeles Arrien’s book ‘The Second Half of Life.’  In the olden days that would have been around 25 or 30 when the life expectancy was 50 or so. Nowadays the second half seems past middle age, giving us more time to screw up and having less time to use the stories’ medicine. But the second half doesn’t begin at a particular age. Some very mature people may be entering their second half at age 25 while others may never get there. I know of a guy with orange hair who is not even close. I wish I had discovered this book (and the stories) when I was 25.

The book is full of stories and myths that contain lessons (medicine) that we have to learn while on our earthly walk, and in particular during the last part of that walk. The stories are drenched in symbolism; symbols that only people with considerable life experience can decipher (or with help form interpreters like Joseph Campbell and Clarissa Pinkola-Estes) but these stories can also be read to young children. In the US they tend to get the expunged versions.  

One of Arrien’s stories has a remarkable resemblance to a story I recently read to my 5 year old granddaughter Saffi out of an old book of fairytales I carried with me from Holland (Sprookjes van de Lage Landen). The version I read to Saffi is about a wife, found cheating by her husband, who slays the lover and incarcerates the woman (in one version cutting her eyes out) and then letting the wife out of her cellar to eat once a day. In Arrien’s version she get to drink soup out of the skull of her lover (in that version she also has to sleep on top of the dead bodies of preceding lovers) or, in my Dutch book’s version, eat the meat of the lover’s body that is slowly roasting in back of the fire. 

A gruesome story with a lesson that isn’t as gruesome and has little to do with ‘thou shall not covet another person’s wife (or husband).’ Arrien’s retelling is about letting the skeleton’s out of the closet (or cellar) and face all the wrongdoings in one’s life, get beyond fear and pride and set things right (the latter lesson a boon for philanthrophy).

I do wonder what Saffi gets out of all these centuries-old stories. Her retelling of them to her parents or grandfather is fascinating because of what she leaves in and what she leaves out. And I noticed she doesn’t shudder much when someone’s head is cut off (because he was looking for death) and then sewn on backwards and eventually turned the right way out of compassion, or when the alleged adulterous wife gets to eat part of her lovers thigh (‘what is adulterous?”).

Being at home means that one is always on. On for chores, on for paying bills, fixing stuff, grandchild duty, preparing for attendance at this or that event, learning, doing paid or volunteer work. Looking back at my many years of travel I realized that in this COVID year I have missed the switching off that planes allowed me to do; the empty time between take-off and landing. That is the time I would be writing, a kind of writing that comes from being in the ‘off’ mode. When you look up from writing in a plane (or even in a hotel room), there is nothing that summons one to action as when one is at home. Now, here, at home, I can count several things that need my attention, without even turning my head. In planes and hotel rooms there are few summons (do this, clean that, fix me, cook me, plan, etc.). Those off hours are like the time between dusk and dark or dawn and day – just broad shadowy outlines of what is out there.

I have articulated some new intention. They do require some doing but without the ‘check the box’ end point: writing for writing’s sake, playing the ukulele without having to make it to the next level on my Yousician score board, and (stationary) biking without the need to cover a certain number of miles at a specific pace. 

I have always been a driven person, may be because, as number 4 in a family of 5, I had so much looking up to – things I wanted to do but could not yet. In my adult life I was driven to take on assignments or reach levels of performance or completion that always included stretching. It is a very hard habit to shake now that I am approaching retirement. I still take courses that require completion, but these now come without certificates, just the completion of an experience that enriches me.

I completed one such course in March, four half Saturdays, with a wonderful coach in South Africa.  I learned much from her about Ubuntu coaching and the South African greeting of Sawabona (I see you I hear you). I recognized the role reversal taking place this late in my life/career: instead of being the white teacher with a class full of black people, I was the white student surrounded by a teacher and class full of mostly black South Africans.  

When I look back on my life as a teacher in the international development space, I see the arrogance of it all – exporting American (or may be European) concepts and techniques about management & leadership, team work and performance and pouring these down the throats of people who have learned to admire (and may be even be envious) of ‘the west.’

I have kept a diary since the late 70s. Once (this must have been during an ‘off’ time, possibly a very long plane ride), I extracted sections from my handwritten diary entries for an (unpublished) piece called ‘Invisible Ink.’ In my introduction I wrote:

“When two people or two groups come together in a consulting relationship, when one person or group gives advice to another, there is a lot more present than what’s visible. Each party comes to the interchange with years and years of baggage. Each person or group has had good or bad experiences with authority, stereotyping, exploitation, conflict and its consequences, with power. Each individual also comes with a self that has defined itself in terms of competence, likeability, attractiveness, smartness and significance, and has either seen this confirmed or disconfirmed in his or her interactions with others.

This is the invisible ink that is written in the margins of our interactions with others. It is usually not readable unless held over a flame, which sparks the behavioral manifestations that hint at some of these experiences. Of course, this is also the stuff that doesn’t make it into reports, and sometimes not even into our consciousness.” 

When asked by former colleagues who are preparing MSH’s 50^th anniversary events, whether I was willing to chat with one of them for an hour about stories, I agreed. And, in preparation for the call that took place yesterday, I re-read my Invisible Ink piece and shared it. 

The trips and experiences described in Invisible Ink are as vivid in my mind as if they just happened. That is the nice thing about journaling. I am sure I would have forgotten many aspects of these trips, not so much the facts (dates, places, assignments) but rather the feelings and reflections about the experience. And now, all these years later, I see how I struggled with this unidirectional flow of knowledge, the cultural dominance (if only I had known about Ubuntu then). I think we (as a tribe of Northamerican/European international consultants) have done much harm in these exchanges that often weren’t exchanges at all: teaching people to be direct when direct can be insensitive or asking for honest feedback when that goes across everything people have learned as children. To speak truth to power when that can kill you.  I, a Dutch person at heart and an American for most of my professional life, still believe that directness and feedback and speaking up are good practices, but now know that these are good practices for me. 

In my retelling of stories to my MSH colleague I picked out several where I ended up the learner. Those were experiences I created for others. They triggered strong responses from my students by doing something that was taken out of the Dutch-American context and plopped into an Arabic, Afghan, Kenyan context without thinking about consequences. And these are only the few where people stood up against me – imagine the countless ones where people didn’t dare to. These were the missed learnings. Now, however late in life, I am (re-)assembling those learnings and, hopefully, be a better person for it.