Sylvia's Journal

I am leaving today for Amsterdam first and then onwards to Kabul. I am leaving with a sore throat, itching in my ears and throat and a painful cough. I also leave with pain in my heart about a long-awaited meeting at work yesterday that went off the tracks and generated so many strong feelings that I still don’t quite know what to do with them all, especially the ones I am not supposed to have (I know there is no such thing, but the neocortex is busy sending messages to my consciousness that are hard to ignore). My dreams revealed some other aspects of the inner turbulence with scenes of ‘not being able to reach’ and seeing myself through someone else’s eyes, covered in shit. Not a pretty picture. I vaguely remember scenes of mountains and a small child stepping outside the lines. Going on a trip right now seems the right kind of distraction, sore throat and all. If only I could take Axel along.

It is safer to write about Axel who had his 6 months check up with the spine doctor. Axel got the latest MRI of his back explained and commented on it as ‘a mess.’ His L4 vertebra, injured in an earlier (car) crash some 20 years ago was damaged once again in the plane crash leaving things rather unaligned and with pressure on nerves that explain the frequent pains. Exercising will help, especially those that strengthen his core muscles that help him sit and stand upright. This is not easy because his spine wasn’t straight to begin with. The exercises are, of course, for life. Today he will see another new specialist, the hand doctor, to sort out the painful muscles and swelling of his left hand. This may all seem like bad news but Axel was in very good spirits when I came home and treated me like a sick child with much love and tenderness.

We watched the second part of Bush’s War, if that is the title, on PBS and I saw magnified a thousandfold the organizational dynamics that are part and parcel of the experience of working with others, including those we experienced yesterday at work. Except in this case the consequences were beyond description in terms of damage, devastation, money and death. If I wasn’t already a Quaker I would become one after seeing this series. Most striking is the senselessness of it all when you realize that there are many bruised egos behind big decisions, not simply greed as some assume; egos that express themselves in language like “I’ll [expletive] show him” (or her, now that we have Condi on the scene). The story is about hubris and not being held accountable for one’s actions, simply because of position. Once again I could not see the documentary till the end but we all know how the story continues on the surface. My hunch is that underneath the surface it is more of the same as well. And now it is time to pack.

I woke up twice last night from the noise I was making grinding my teeth. I dreamt about the virtual leadership course I am teaching this week, about doctors and nurses and power and hierarchy and the things that distract or attract them. It is funny how in dreams feelings and concepts are ground into one and then make a sound that wakes you up.

At a subconscious level I may also have been grinding my teeth over the stupendous alpha male behavior in the early Bush (jr.) years that landed us in the war mess we are in now. We watched a documentary last night about Bush’s war. I couldn’t help thinking about the people who lost husbands, wives and children in this war and the feelings opened up an abyss of despondency. Along the edges of this abyss are jealousy, competition, self-centeredness, shame and a whole host of feelings and states of mind that I recognize at any distance. It is the stuff that life is made up off; it is the stuff that is often referred to as ‘touchy feely’ or ‘warm fuzzies’ in my line of work. Yet the consequences of ignoring these drivers of human behavior are far from warm and fuzzy. One of our Quaker Friends, Nancy, who faithfully stands vigil for Peace on the Boston Common each year on Good Friday, told us in Meeting about two Vietnam veterans who hackled them, shouting slurs and shooting imaginary bullets at the small peaceful group. The two disheveled, homeless and drunk men had lost something irreplaceable in that war; each day, in Iraq, we are producing a few more of them. Not heroes, not patriots but shells of people coming back, trying to integrate into a society that does not understand them anymore. Frequent articles in the Globe talk about failed re-integration of returning soldiers into their families, leaving everyone diminished and drained.

We are also feeling a little diminished here, but of a different kind. Our large nuclear family of the Easter weekend has shriveled up to half its size. Sita left for Dallas and the London Ontario contingent, including puppy, left in the morning for the long drive west. Everyone has arrived safely. Tomorrow I am heading out east, first to Holland and then Afghanistan, leaving Jim and Axel to fend for themselves.

I woke up from what felt like a parallel life. My dreams were so vivid, so real and,except for Axel and myself, populated by people I either don’t know or who I see very little, like minor characters or extras in my life’s play. There was the scene at the beach, a bit like Rockport but but different: the sea was shallow and the land had fjords; an amalgam of Cape Cod and Norway. A friend with a baby in her belly, who looked a bit like Fiona who also (still?) has a baby in her belly, came to visit and we talked about great places on the ocean to take babies too. The best place, we concluded was anyplace as long as you brought a nanny, while I looked out over the water of an inner harbor that was full of enormous water lillies about to break through he surface. The water was so clear you could see them growing to the surface. There was a younger woman who claimed to have worked for a store called ‘Best Leather.’ She did not know Tessa? I did not ask about DJ because it seemed so obvious that she would know him; no use wasting a question on that.

Earlier or later, temporal sequences seem meaningless in dreams, I went to what looked like a bank but was really a place where you could ‘re-balance’ your votes, the way you would re balance an investment account. I traded in my one 100% vote for one candidate and received in exchange 3 votes of 33.3% for each of three candidates. I think our district’s legislator himself did the exchange, which did not strike me as odd. I could not do the exchange for Axel though, that was illegal. These weighty things had to be done in person but the place was about to close. I got all sorts of forms for Axel to fill in. He was supposed to be waiting for me outside in a car (that looked like the old Peugeot 404 that my father had) but when I walked out of the building he was gone and I realized I did not have my cellphone with me. I walked up and down the block and then into town. At some point streams of people walked out of a building onto a street towards buses. I scanned the place from higher ground and followed a man who looked like Axel but later morphed into someone else. Eventually I found him and there was an exchange of some angry words I suspect. I can’t really remember, the images are popping like soap bells – gone!

The dreams and deep sleep were probably triggered by another very, very long day that consisted mostly of a 7 hour workshop on negotiation and conflict management, offered pro-bono to us by a local consulting firm. It was followed by another 3 hours of doing the work I couldn’t do during the workshop, getting me home 12 hours after I left it in the morning. I had brought my computer to the hotel meeting room where the workshop was held in the hope that I could do some work feigning to take notes, in the back; but the room was tiny and I was too exposed. There were long periods of lecture where I would have liked to do something else as my level of panic about everything that had to be done before I get on the plane next Wednesday mounted steadily.

I am still wondering whether it was a good use fo my time. What was good about it was the opportunity for me to be a participant and experience the event from that side. I heard my colleagues mumble before we even had started what they hoped no one would ask about expectations (we were asked as good protocol demands). We also got to gossip about the facilitators (we sometimes forget about that). It was a good reality check. This is what I was reminded of: Seven hours with a working lunch break is not good, if you cannot cover all the material, remove some rather than stuff things into the allotted time. Cases do little for me and they never capture reality like real life does. Theory before application requires so much more time lecturing. Energy in the room matters, etc. etc. Since I am doing a TOT (training of trainers) in Kabul next week, thiswas a good reminder, but it was a bit of a costly reminder of things I tend to stress anyways in my teaching. They did teach us a nice model about roles and decision making that I think I can use when there is tension about these things.

I came home to an empty house which was actually fine. With a beer and fajitas Tessa had prepared me I collapsed in front of the TV where I watched the end of one Agatha Christie mystery and then watched another mystery from murder to resolution. Halfway through it Axel came home and he watched the last ending with me. I tumbled into bed and remember nothing more except for the dream bubbles that I grasped before they vanished.

With the new daylight savings time I am waking up again in the middle of the night it seems. It is pitch dark and cold; another one of these ‘having to bite through’ periods; this time not because of bodily pain or anything like that, but a simple ‘because I don’t like it.’

Having learned to bite through (not really bad stuff) as a child is part of my cultural heritage. It is woven into the protestant work ethic of the Dutch which taught me that life should not be lived in pursuit of fun. The childhood variant is ‘homework first, play later.’ I was lucky in that the homework was always a cinch and play, with the many children on our street, was fun and outside the door, not requiring parental drop off or pick up.

I woke up with fragments of a dream. I quickly scribbled these on a piece of paper before I took my shower so I would not forget. I do this with my eyes closed. Sometimes, when I get out of the shower and have my glasses on I cannot decipher what I wrote. But this time I could: looking at street scenes of one culture while sitting inside and with people from another. We were watching a slide show. I had intended to hook up my iPod to the slide show and have some of my favorite music, but someone else had already done that. He had selected other music, not what I would have chosen, but it matched so well that we kept it on and I put my iPod away. I remember saying to the people watching that these street scenes were not all that different from those in their country. I also remember expecting protest (‘No, everything is very different from us!”)

I think the dream was triggered by an email from a colleague who said the (African) country he lived in was unique. I wrote back, ‘of course it is, every country is unique!’ The dream is not about surface but about what is underneath. As a psychologist I am intensely interested in people’s life stories and hear how their current ‘being in the world’ was shaped. Much like my growing up in a Dutch protestant family shaped me. This is also why I have to understand my dreams; that comes from the thread of Enlightenment that is also woven into Dutch Protestant culture.

Another trigger for the dream might have been the lunch we had at MSH with the Minister of Health from Guyana. I was already impressed by him when he remembered Cabul who was a volunteer in Guyana several years ago. While we were eating he told us one story after another. There is much writing in the leadership literature about story telling as an important tool for leaders. This gentleman was a master of the trade. He has also been minister of health longer than most any of the many MSH has been dealing with over the years. Storytelling is a craft of the long haul I think and he proved it. It combines seeing patterns and then collecting moments in life that illustrate those patterns.

Later in the afternoon the story of the day that is only now revealed to me through my dream continued. I was asked by our young (20s/30s) staff to help them hone their facilitation skills. Two of them practiced a short session on the rest of us which we then critiqued and I got to tell stories. I loved it. They kept thanking me profusely at the end for my time; what they didn’t know is that such sessions are the highlight of my day. I think I am a mentor/teacher at heart. My one piece of advice to them was to get a sturdy backpack, an imaginary one, and keep tossing stories inside it, much like the minister has done. These stories can be pulled out any time to illustrate a concept, a theory, or a belief. I have some well-worn stories in my backpack. They are like the old blankies, teddy bears or dolls from our childhood, and comfort us as much as they enlighten others.

Axel dropped the boys off at his old school (UNH) where they teamed up with a third friend who is now studying there and who, according to Axel, had already become an American in speech and outer appearance. He had lunch in the school cafeteria and told them stories about the student protest he was heavily involved in nearly 40 years ago.

In the evening Axel went to a career fair at Mass. College of Art and he was welcomed back in the crowd like a long lost son. He made some good connections and returned back in high spirits. It was a community that he temporarily lost because of the accident and one that he discovered was more important to him than he had realized. Stories and communities, these are also two big elements of our recovery.

I woke up early when my dreams had sufficiently made the case that I had failed in some way or another by not getting ‘to the end’. There were three parts to the dream that stayed with me after waking up: one with Axel carrying a tray of food into a huge dining hall to a place where friends of us were sitting. I told him I had to go to the bathroom and would join him later. Then, in my dreams it is hours later, I am still looking for building F where the bathrooms supposedly are. I am now in the middle of a big city and I can’t find the building as it is not between E and G where I would expect it. I do finally find a large bathhouse, a bit like the Hammam in Istanbul except there is no marble and it is not beautiful old but decrepit old. A lady sits behind the counter and tells me I cannot swim because the pool is cloudy. I can see that from where I stand and re-assure her that I don’t want to swim and am only looking for a bathroom. She points me to their ‘bathroom suites,’ everything for body comfort, but no toilets. I get a call from my friends in the dining hall, where Axel arrived some time ago with my tray, “where are you?”

The last scene is a small rural airport and I am sitting on the grass watching planes land. A large and complex plane with retractable gear and lots of horsepower is coming in for landing and then, on final stretch, it flips up and over, spins around and crashes on the ground. I don’t know what to do and want to walk away. I feel out of my depth with such a tragedy. I notice others don’t have any hesitation and run to the plane, open the door and unstrap the dazed pilot. He is fine and walks out of the crumpled cockpit. That is when I woke up.

The dream explains why I have not written for two days – the dream is about unfinished or incomplete business, but no bodily harm done. I am continuing to make marathon days of more than twelve hours to finish the facilitator materials for our leadership program on a special website before I take of for Tanzania on Saturday evening. These are the notes for my family of facilitators in Ghana, Guyana, Swaziland, Nepal, Iraq, Kenya. There are more, but those are the ones I know. They are the people who are or will be implementing the leadership development programs that my MSH colleagues and I have started. I think that my staying power and unrelenting focus is possible because I see what I am doing as a personal gift to them. I have a picture of them, patiently waiting at the end of the tunnel.

Axel appearing with a food tray in the dream movie is quite apt. If he (or Sita & Jim) would not be preparing meals for me I would live on whatever is heatable and eatable in the refrigerator, as I did yesterday, the same dish for lunch and dinner. Last night everyone was gone to various commitments in Boston and Manchester and I was home alone, moving from one page to the next and the next. Axel found me in exactly the same position as he had left me several hours earlier.

I periodically call my colleague Cary who is the evaluation expert and announce myself on the phone as “The Department of Advanced Studies in the Challenge Model.” She is my co-conspirator and cheerleader. She is the person I call when I run into another little glitch or inconsistency in the models we use and the teaching instructions we have developed for those models. There is nothing like writing teaching instructions – my technical writer friends know all about this. I wouldn’t want to do it for a living – although it seems like I do right now. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing the end users and also knowing the awkwardness of having to teach someone else’ materials and finding that there are some conceptual jumps or gaps and doing this while standing in front of an audience that expects, at least conceptual, flawlessness.

And because of this total and all-encompassing focus on the words on my computer screen I would have missed a most awesome sight yesterday morning if Axel had not commandeered me upstairs to look out of our bedroom window over the cove: crystal clear water and a cerulean blue sky mirroring each other; on the water a gaggle of Canada geese and a flock of smaller black and wide duck-like birds, floating peaceful on the surface. That then was a little sprinkle of beauty over an otherwise black, white and grey computer day.

I woke up with the words ‘Blimey’ on my lips, the only thing I remember from a series of vivid dreams. This is a word I have never uttered consciously. I discovered that it is called a ‘minced oath’ and is a contraction of ‘May God blind me.’ The unconscious works in funny ways; there is some Dutch in there (‘bli’) which is pronounced like the Dutch word for happy (blij). Happy me?

I finished the book on deep survival and it did leave me happy. Happy that we simply crashed in a bog, from about 700 feet up, rather than in shark-infested waters or on a 12.000 feet mountain ridge. Such are the stories in the book. Only a few people survived these catastrophic events and their stories of despair, hope, agony, fear, hunger, thirst and pain made our crash appear a walk in the woods.

The non-linearity of our recovery is in evidence once more. The boundary between normal and abnormal sensation in my foot is changing again but this time in the wrong direction. The sharp pains at the place of the ankle break have come back and the neck recovery appears at a standstill. It is reminder that I am not quite there yet, about 5 more months to go to that imaginary finish line that the doctor’s drew, back then in the hospital.

Yesterday we drove to Newburyport for a consultation about our financial affairs. This is a bit of a hot button issue between Axel and me but the consultant’s sensible advice made us feel much better. We left after an hour and a half with renewed commitment to simplify our lives and abstain as much as we can from the national American pastime of raking up credit card debt. The other half of the equation is Axel getting a more regular income. He is starting to engage in conversations with potential places of employment where his skills and talent might be of use.

On the way back we stopped at Edith and Hugh’s house that is being rehabbed. Like our muscles and tendons it is not quite there yet, a slow work in progress. We had a half local winter soup and a blow by blow account of their recent trip to Costa Rica. It appears there are a lot of Americans in Costa Rica; pensionados who are looking for relatively cheap tropical warmth and then some who have had it with this (US) Administration and are waiting things out in a place that has no army (like Albie and Lydia).

Our financial/social day ended with a home-cooked dinner for Annie and Lark who we had not seen since early fall when Annie had been driving us places and Lark had whisked Axel away for a ‘boys night out’ and fed him his first post-crash alcohol. Last night he continued to take Axel back on that wicked road but he is up against Sita and me; no match, really.

Sita and Jim have gone off for the weekend to Western Massachusetts to make music and thus we have the place to ourselves, like the olden days.

I had a dream about the arrogance of power. It included uniformed bullies and fear to challenge a person in authority out of a desire to get something done. In spite all the bravery that has been ascribed to me, I believe that I am one of these persons who would cower in the face of authority, especially uniformed authority when I like to get to the other (good) side of that person.

I wondered where the theme of ‘power’ came from. Maybe it was triggered by a review of the curriculum and handouts of a course that MSH is teaching in Boston University’s Summer Institute for International Health. One of the sessions I taught in the course’s first year was about power (arrogant and regular). This is the same course that we were in the middle of when the crash took place. In fact, the day after the crash, on Sunday July the 15th, we were expecting all the students at a barbecue at our house, and two days after the crash I was supposed to have started teaching. MSH reserve troops were called in to teach that week in my stead and they did it seamlessly. The course became one of the top two courses in the 2007 Summer Institute. That was a rather stark lesson about how dispensable we are, professionally at least. It is also an argument for having teaching notes that someone else can pick up.

Maybe the arrogance of power dream was the result of seeing a picture of Bush and McCain in an awkward embrace on a platform someplace, with the caption: Eight more years? Why not one hundred! I assume it was photoshopped but could not tell which is actually scary. Or, and this is probably the real reason, the dream came out of listening to a book on tape, called Inventing a Nation by Gore Vidal. It is all about power: how to apportion it, give it away, rein it in, and the individual interpretation of what it allows and disallows.

Yesterday, after another day of primarily catching up at work (will I ever get caught up?), and a quiet dinner with Axel, it was time for our periodical OBTS Board-meeting-by-phone. I remembered the first one last October and re-read my journal entry on that day. The best thing about a journal is that it makes progress so visible. I have surely come a long way (and so has Axel). I completed the work for the OBTS elections with the material for the election website delivered to our webmaster. This work started in November and it is nice to be able to tick it off my to-do list.