Sylvia's Journal

Today is Tessa’s birthday, a momentous day 34 years ago.  The lore of that day includes Axel burning the croissants we had brought to a crisp in the birth center’s oven which had clicked shut to self-clean. The smoke summoned the fire brigade. All this while I was in labor or resting with a baby on my belly. That I cannot remember.

This is the first time we are celebrating Tessa’s birthday in her own house. I got up early to collect the flowers necessary for decorating her chair. Our daughters and their families have added a new habit by adding various tchotchkes found around the house (and for the kids, their favorite toys). But the first order of business this rainy morning was finding the flowers. There aren’t as many here as there are at our house because the chickens eat most flowers within their reach. I found enough to do the chair.

And now Tessa is one year older. According to one Google search (quoting an unnamed study), she is entering the last year of her youth. Others claim that middle age or middle adulthood starts at 40 or even 45 – at any rate for our daughters middle age is coming into view. Imagine that!

When she was very little I wondered what it would be like to have grown up children. I couldn’t really imagine that, immersed as we were in the demanding tasks of childrearing.

At that same time I found my parents rather old.  And now we are these old parents ourselves, though I am not sure I daughters see us as old the same way we did way back when.

When I look at pictures of my parents’ age group at the age I am now I see old people, dressed in old-looking and tired looking clothes. When I go another generation back I see 50 year old grandmas in rocking chairs. Times they are a-changing.

We feel still rather young, even though we are what the French call our ‘third age.’  Is there a fourth, I wonder? Some years ago I decided that my aspiration was to reach 130 years. Then, one day, someone said that she felt sorry for me, as she noticed my joints are already problematic now. This led me to revise my aspiration downward a bit.  It’s 95 in my retirement money needs calculator, so it will be somewhere between 95 and 130. By then all my joints should be titanium.

The day after I returned from South Africa, the work at home picked up to a frantic pace. We had 5 days left to get our house ready for 5 total strangers to move in for a week. We started preparing for that earlier this year by tackling the big projects, such as rehabbing the bathroom upstairs, cleaning kitchen cabinets, decluttering. Now, with only a few days left the to-do list had ballooned to 50 tasks – mostly small, but all consuming.

On Thursday, by the time we closed the doors behind us, just hours before the family would arrive, I was exhausted, but pleased. The house looked like a dream. I would have killed to come from the Colorado mountains and (having arrived in the dark), and wake up to Lobster Cove at its best on a 10+ day. 

The home exchanges this summer (there are 3), are a pilot for something more serious – a paid for summer rental while we retreat to a (much cheaper) summer rental further north or west. This we see in our not too far future. While our house and surroundings are being enjoyed by others, we are moving in with our daughters, three days in Easthampton and four days in New Hampshire, where, for the first time ever, we will celebrate Tessa’s birthday (July 2) in her home.

Yesterday we completed the second in the series of Easthampton Futures, working in and with the space created two weeks ago, and perfected on Friday. We spent most of Friday getting the space ready, checking off the multiple tasks, made the necessary purchases and got to know our fellow crew members for this event.

If the first session was about discovery and sensemaking, this one was about possibilities and prototyping, initiating the shift from divergence to convergence: we worked down from a 60000 foot view of a preferred future to about 5000 ft, making the contours of possible paths down to the valley more visible.

I was a little disappointed in the turnout. I had hoped that the buzz created by the first event would propel more people towards Eastworks – the converted mill building where all sessions take place. It was, just like last time, a glorious Saturday after a week of rain. Given the dismal spring we have had so far, I cannot blame people to want to be outdoors rather than indoors thinking about the future. It is the one time that we think of a sunny weekend day as a problem.

Still, it was an inspired and energy-filled day during which I daresay, everyone learned at least one new thing. I learned from than one. Sita introduced all of us to a framework (the Futures Cone) that is a huge improvement on the way I have most often seen ‘futures’ envisioned (essentially a linear extrapolation from the present, or what sometimes goes for a prediction). By the way, the only people I know of who have ever successfully predicted the future were Da Vinci, Gordon Moore (Moore’s Law) and Kurzweil. The rest of us earthlings have done so rather poorly.

The Futures Cone is a tool to help think about possible futures, plausible futures, probably futures and preferred futures. I led a small group, using this tool, to think about these various futures as it related to the intersection of arts & culture on the one hand, and space, environment, resources (natural, energy, human, etc) and sustainability on the other. We spent 45 minutes building on each other’s ideas and easily finding a convergence towards a series of paths forward. It was such a productive conversation that I cannot imagine how we’d gotten to a similar place in any other way.

For someone raised on a diet of languages (6) in high school and then further nourished on behavioral (Pavlovian & Skinnerian) psychology in university, the recent advances in neuroscience and epigenetics has led me through some spectacular French doors into a landscape that rivals Versailles. Not a professional landscaper or neuroscientist, I am wowed by the beauty of what I see, by the surprises when I stumble on a new perspective, without understanding the intricate and unimaginable complexity of what went into the creation of all this wonder, our neural system. 

My newly acquired academic credentials, if they can be called such, come from webinars, online courses, MOOCs and books. I have become an avid student of everything that sheds light on the complex and often hard to understand behavior of people. Why do people do things that create exactly the consequences they don’t want? Why, when they know what is good and not good for them, do they postpone action that would lead to better health, more joy and more love in their lives? 

Life is made up of cycles, and I find myself cycling back to things I had to read in university. The fights between Freudians and Kleinians in mid 20^thcentury London seemed of little import at the time. Having been brought up, after WWII, in a pretty harmonious family, with parents who loved each other deeply, how could I relate to childhood abandonment theories, trauma and such? Now I feel drawn back to the readings that meant so little to me, and which I now realize are classics because of what they brought to the surface. That what happens early in children’s life becomes a driving force (for good or bad) in that child’s adult life. 

What’s puzzling to me now is why I picked psychology when I knew so little about it, had no self-awareness and knew only two psychologists. These were the father and mother of my classmate Edith in grade school. Her mother was a child therapist and had an office (at home) full of toys, doll houses, lots of dolls. When I first laid eyes on that office I said to myself, that looks like a fun job. I want to be like that. Even though, at 13, I had no idea what psychology and therapy were all about.  Edith’s father was an industrial psychologist with an office next door. His office was a typical office with a conference table and lots of binders and folders and books. I think I may have seen it once and never returned as it was boring to a 13 year old. Now 54 years later I am struck by the merger I am finding myself in the middle of: the merger between understanding a child’s early life experience and how these then play out in and out of the office. Edith’s parents influenced me deeply. Edith herself went into a direction that had nothing to do with what her parents did. She studied potatoes.

This weekend Axel an I served as crew to an event that Sita organized in Easthampton – a small grant she got from the planning department, with a focus on arts and culture. The Easthampton Futures project kicked off on Saturday with a daylong event that focused on discovery and sensemaking. It was the first of three such events that eventually will move towards people to action to tackle the usual tensions an competing agendas that, if not addressed, can tear a community apart.  

Sita has two qualities I admire, qualities that I recognize from my earlier event design and planning days, but Sita has taken them to new heights. In this day and age where everything has a price, usually one we can hardly afford, Sita mobilizes (human) resources by simply holding a vision in front of them: what if we could mobilize the community (in which she lives) to be intentional about managing the changes that people are seeing and often feel helpless about.

Members of the work crew traveled from wide and far to be part of this event – I believe only one  was actually being paid – the rest of us were volunteers, many not even living in Easthampton. What bound us together was the experience that we wanted to have – to be part of this, learn from Sita (yes, we are now learning from our kids), and meet the most interesting people.

There was an inordinate amount of work to do, starting early on Friday morning. Large (8×4 ft) triangular pillars of card board needed to be constructed, furniture and plants brought down from Sita’s artspace on the 2^ndfloor of the old mill building. There were nametag/booklets with quotes to be assembled, a registration system devised, signage, activity instructions, a separate children’s area cordoned off with ropes and blankets and much more. Sita’s husband Jim created the most amazing small retreat places, a pyramid and a Buckminster Fuller dome, all made entirely out of cardboard and held together with binder clips and tape. Lamb skins on the ground made for a comfy time out from all the togetherness.

What Sita is doing is co-creating with others and prototyping ways to hold communities together – it’s a very challenging thing to do – as there are such distances, between old and young, people who struggle and those who thrive, old timers and newcomers, artists and non-artists, renters and landlords. I remember a town nearby where most of the houses were boarded up, business had left or failed, and artists could afford to live – decades later these this is a fancy place to live. A two-bedroom condo costs up from half a million. The town of Easthampton wants to avoid that, preserve what is special and recognize that change is inevitable, but if managed, can be harnessed for good. We will go back in 2 weeks for the second phase of this project. I don’t think I can ever sit through a conference where there are more than 100 power points  slides in one day – and people passively watching rather than talking with each other. That is not what the world needs these days.

Multiple strands are coming together, centering around the brain. I may still understand little about what is going on in our brains but it is a lot more than I did only 2 years ago. It all started with a promotional video by an extraordinary woman named Judith E. Glaser, about her Conversational Intelligence™ program. That was my first introduction to how we think and how we converse with each other bring about chemical changes which then bring about other changes in how we relate to each other, the culture we create and thus our ability to rise to great heights and be creative together (or not). I enrolled in her course and saw it through to certification over a one year period. It changed everything.

I soon realized I was missing some critical information about the anatomy and functions of our brains – so I completed a 3 month Coursera course on neurobiology for lay people. That taught me something about the limbic system and the hippocampus and how our vision and hearing and speech work, and much more.

I started to listen to webinars on coaching and the brain and suddenly I found courses and webinars and books on neuroscience (for lay people) everywhere. Then I encountered the word epigenetics and could not grasp what that was all about, so I enrolled in another Coursera course on Epigenetics and paid the 49 dollars for the certificate. Not that a certificate is important to me but paying 49 dollars keeps me from dropping out when the going gets tough. It is forcing me to pass the quiz for each module.  The 7 module course is a huge stretch for me. Although I was good in chemistry in high school, I never learned about biochemistry and molecular biology. I have, miraculously, received a passing grade for the first four quizzes. Passing is the right word, no spectacular results. Some of my answers are guesses and some I really knew. My brain is working overtime. 

Axel wondered if I was actually learning anything or just studying for the tests. I actually do now understand at least something about DNA, gene expression, RNA and methylation and acetylation, long non-coding RNAs, enzymes and what not. I now know that saying ‘that’s just the way I am’ is nonsense. We are what we believe, what we eat, were we live, how our parents treated us, what we see, hear, touch and smell. This is the work of epigenetics. Which, incidentally, is also the essence of countless books and webinars that the internet algorithms now place on my path. And I reward these algorithms by buying the books, registering for the webinar, taking the courses. It’s the ultimate mimicry of how the brain works – more learning, more practice, more strands of neural fibers.

I have been admonished by some of my faithful readers to write more. Why haven’t I been writing for a month? Too busy? I think I was busier before my full time job was terminated. It’s true that the busier I was the more organized I was. So this is a reboot.

I have been kind of busy, but not accompanied by the usual discipline of writing. Since my last post about Senegal I have returned to cold and wintry Massachusetts, went on a ski trip with the grand kids, made a brief trip to North Carolina with its daffodils and flowering trees and returned home to suffer through a series of three snow storms in a row, leaving us with half a meter of snow and lots of black ice.

The grandkids took to cross country skiing with great ease and glee. Saffi’s bottom is about one foot off the ground, so falling and getting up was no big deal, a source of much giggling and laughing by all. Both she and Faro loved going fast down tracks of the little practice hills in front of the Jackson X-country ski lodge. Oma functioned as a ski lift from time to time, pulling Saffi up by her ski pole. Faro was old enough for lessons and made quick progress.

After I became a free agent I had signed us up at the Home Exchange site, a French site that helps people switch homes for a short period. We have three exchanges organized for the summer: one with a family from Breckenridge, CO (though we won’t do the exchange, getting points instead which will allow us to ‘pay’ for stays in people’s homes when they are elsewhere or their second homes); then one with a family from Scotland – we are switching homes for two weeks, and finally one with a family from Canada who will be in our house while we are in Maine. It is our very first experience having strangers stay in our home and it has led to some long overdue repairs and much decluttering. As for the latter we are getting excellent decluttering advice from the book ‘Let It Go’ by Peter Walsh (no, we didn’t find Konmari’s approach as helpful).

And so this is where we are now – the upstairs bathroom is empty (and therefore out of order) except for the bathtub. Carpenters, plumbers, painters and floor sanders are lined up, we hope, in the right succession. With this we are finally turning a bathroom with distinct 50s features (Kelly green trim, severely rusted pipes, leaks, rusted sink, plug-prone toilet) into a 21st century bathroom that is code compliant and has a fresh new look.

On Friday I drove to Boston to get my old violin looked at. I had expected to pay a few hundred dollars and wait a few weeks to get it back, repaired and ready for my first violin lesson in at least 3 decades. 

As it turned out the was so much wrong with my old violin that the option of simply renting a new one for a while became more attractive. It would come all ready to play with a case, a bow, new strings and guaranteed new string if any of them would snap, even a new block of rosin for my bow. The repair lady asked me whether the violin had sentimental value, in case repairs might be worthwhile before she started to point out all the places that needed to be re-glued, re-attached and re-shaped. I told her no. Half an hour later I walked out with my new rental – I had made a commitment for one year. It was cheaper and the rent would count towards eventual purchase. I will made my old violin available to anyone who wants a violin for decoration.

It was strange to put the violin under my chin again. My first efforts to play were horrible and I realized I had seriously overestimated my ability to play again. I called my ukulele teacher and asked for a violin teacher and told her I was ready to start with lessons right away.

Awaiting the appointment for my first lesson I started practicing scales-whether for my ukulele or violin, I knew you could never practice your scales enough. That is when I noticed my shoulder repairs had left me with very little stamina to keep the violin up – five minutes is all I could manage before my arm started to drop. I don’t know whether it’s simply a matter of building up muscle again or whether the rotator cuff surgery had left me impaired for good.  I have decided I will play 5 minutes (scales only) several times a day to see if there is any progress. In the meantime the ukulele teacher has also asked me to do finger exercises to send messages to my aching finger joints that they need to loosen up. Musci heals, I am told. I will test that.

The income generating activities planned for January are not happening as planned, thanks to our president. This will thus be my first month without any income. It’s not affecting my spending pattern tough. Inspired by my ukulele lessons and the joy I get from making music, however clumsy, I have decided to pick up my violin again, and take lessons – for the first time in 4 decades. The violin needs some work, and a new case. The case arrived today, so now I can take the instrument to be repaired and fixed up – a new bridge, new strings and new hair on my bow. It’s a costly operation, but the urge to play the violin again after all these years is strong. The money will have to come out of my retirement fund, which appears to be recovering from a steep drop late last year. 

As part of my effort to avoid getting stale in my coaching skills I registered for peer coaching, organized by the International Coach Federation of which I am a member and by which I am accredited (albeit at the lowest level).  I coach someone in Wisconsin and am being coached by someone in Vancouver. My Vancouver coach asked me about my transition from full time employment to self-employed. After having been FT employed for more than 30 years it was a transition. She asked me what I was transitioning to. I didn’t know and have thought much about it. Over the last 4 sessions with her things have become clearer: a physical move to my new office cut ties with my ‘work-from-home-MSH office.’ I am literally in a new place and it is entirely mine: the computer and printers, the office equipment, the printing paper, the paperclips, the licenses, the pens and pencils and of course the income. 

My priorities have shifted as well: more time with family (a ski vacation with everyone next month), more time with art (hence the investment in fixing my violin) and, as a combination of both family and art, I just registered us for a three-day course at the Snow Farm Craft Center in Williamsburg (MA) in May. Axel will be learning about Japanese lock printing and I will perfect my glass bead making skills. It was Sita’s idea who told us about the place and gave us a gift certificate for Christmas.

The clarity also included a choice to stay in our house as long as we can by moving the bedroom down into my old office. It will be a major and no doubt costly project – but better done now than when all my joints are creaky and failing (some already are).  And it’s kind of exciting during those dreary winter months, to think about possibilities and new vistas.