Sylvia's Journal

Leaving an organization after 30+ years automatically makes you old, and departures lead to reminiscing. The former was evident when, back at the DC airport, I found an empty seat across from two men engaged in a conversation that, although in English, might as well have been in Sanskrit. I knew they were tech people but that’s all – they strung together words into sentences that made no sense, sometimes I didn’t even know which words constituted the verbs and which the nouns. The one already young looking man complained about young people he was mentoring. So if he was now old, what did that make me?

As for the reminiscences, I have been thinking a lot about the world of work I entered in, my first overseas jobs in Lebanon (1977) and then Senegal (1979) and the pace of life at that time.  I would not be saying on Thursday that I didn’t know whether I would be travelling on Saturday. Now, the only reason I still don’t know for sure, late this Thursday, is that I haven’t seen my Entry Authorization letter because it couldn’t be scanned all these thousands of miles east of us because the scanner broke down and the IT guy had gone home, otherwise I would have known and finalized my ticket. A glitch.

In the olden days I would have to have my handwritten ticket in hand – the one with the multiple red carbon copies. If it wasn’t given to me some days before a trip I couldn’t leave. No internet, no faxes, no nothing instant. I made about 3 trips a year – more would have been a stretch on what was humanly and technologically possible.

That was also the time when business class tickets were just a few hundred dollars more than regular economy seats, and the difference was not as stark as it is now. No flatbeds. There was a time when a trip of more than 14 hours door to door entitled us to travel in business class.

Sometimes it really feels like the ‘olden days’ were better. At least they were slower. I try to remember whether we were all more patient then. Now I see impatience everywhere. “Why didn’t you reply to the email, the text, the call I made a few minutes ago?” I remember setting up a phone call with a Peace Corps volunteer who lived 100 kilometers away from the closest phone that could be used for intercontinental calls, about 6 weeks ahead of time, using a cable to communicate via the nearest post office, most likely in the local capital and then dispatched on a motor cycle or a bush taxi.

My new reality will be that nothing is certain until it is certain – in the past when that happened, when trips got canceled, I was still paid, but after June this will no longer be the case. I will have to sign contracts that will be to the contractor’s advantage – there will be clauses about Intellectual Property (IP) and cancellations without cause. This has already happened with the World Bank assignment in Saudi Arabia – it was canceled, at least for this fiscal year I was told, so there is the possibility of a be chance in the next fiscal year, whenever that starts in Saudi Arabia. It’s quite disappointing and also a cause of worry that if it comes around again, I will already have promised my time to another project. “Welcome to the world of consulting,” say my free agent friends.

In the meantime I am enjoying the last of the paychecks that will continue to come in with great regularity until late June, while also enjoying the prospects of being free from the early morning commute and the dependence on weekends to do the extracurricular things I like to do.

I am busy filling in all the paperwork for a brief teaching stint this summer in a Simmons College MBA program, covering the organizational behavior (OB) part of business administration. It’s a well-designed curriculum that covers all the things I am passionate about. I don’t have to design anything, just read tons of articles and books, though some of them I already know, and some have been written by my OB friends. I am excited about having access to all these articles and reading up on some OB topics I have neglected.

Axel had a pacemaker installed – it is to correct a very slow resting heartbeat. He has always had it and thought it a badge of honor when his heartbeat would not go up during a stress test, no matter how fast the speed or incline. Over the last months this turned out not to be such a good thing and the cardiologist suggested a pacemaker would help the heart beat faster and get more oxygen to wherever it was needed.

We did spent time reading up on pacemakers. His father had one implanted decades ago when the device was just a couple of decades old and there was still much learning and improving.  I remember seeing the big bulge under his skin, it was the size of a bicycle bell, but it kept his heart going and extended his life. We also learned that the device was invented, originally as a transistorized metronome, by a Scandinavian/Dutch doctor/engineer duo who became the founders of what is now a multi-billion dollar company that is keeping countless baby boomers’ hearts ticking at the right rate.

Last Monday he went into the hospital and had the pacemaker installed while under local anesthesia. He would have preferred to be put out for the procedure because he was very hungry (Tessa taught me the word “hangry” which describes people who become very unpleasant to be around when hungry – fasting is of course a requirement for any medical procedure). It also meant he could feel the electrical shocks his body sent out, whether in protest or acceptance of the alien wires we don’t know and don’t understand. He spent the night with a very impatient room mate who escaped to get a real coffee in the morning but was caught.

The timing of Axel’s procedure was very unfortunate as I ran a two day workshop with 6 Japanese women who had come for the month to Boston to learn from big and small NGOs about architecting social change programs. Since I was bringing in younger staff to learn from me and eventually take over the program, I could not cancel at this late stage and the dates were set in stone. Luckily we have two daughters who are very dedicated to their dad. Tessa was the most flexible and came for the day to pick him up from the hospital and look after him until I came home. She saw to it that he was not doing anything the doctors told him not to do, such as lifting things with his left arm, showering and being busy, telling him to quiet down and do nothing.

Now, a week later the stitches are out, the wound is healing well, the wires inside his heart are implanting themselves nicely into the heart muscle and he can drive and shower again. He happily tells everyone who wants to hear that he has gained about 15 extra heartbeats a minute. Imagine what one can do with those!

My new reality will be that nothing is certain until it is certain – in the past when that happened, when trips got canceled, I was still paid, but after June this will no longer be the case. I will have to sign contracts that will be to the contractor’s advantage – there will be clauses about Intellectual Property (IP) and cancellations without cause. This has already happened with the World Bank assignment in Saudi Arabia – it was canceled, at least for this fiscal year I was told, so there is the possibility of a be chance in the next fiscal year, whenever that starts in Saudi Arabia. It’s quite disappointing and also a cause of worry that if it comes around again, I will already have promised my time to another project. “Welcome to the world of consulting,” say my free agent friends.

In the meantime I am enjoying the last of the paychecks that will continue to come in with great regularity until late June, while also enjoying the prospects of being free from the early morning commute and the dependence on weekends to do the extracurricular things I like to do.

I am busy filling in all the paperwork for a brief teaching stint this summer in a Simmons College MBA program, covering the organizational behavior (OB) part of business administration. It’s a well-designed curriculum that covers all the things I am passionate about. I don’t have to design anything, just read tons of articles and books, though some of them I already know, and some have been written by my OB friends. I am excited about having access to all these articles and reading up on some OB topics I have neglected.

Although this new phase of my life, untethered from MSH, has not started yet, the transition is here. I learned much about transitions from Bill Bridges – the notion that new beginnings have to start – always – with endings and then the transition sets in before the new beginning can happen.

The ending process has already started – not a clean surgical strike like when previous layoffs happened – abrupt, unexpected. Mine is gentler – having two months to untether.

In the olden days, when long time staff left, they walked away with much accumulated knowledge that was in their heads and essentials captured in folders and files, left at the office. All that is different now. Now we walk away with terabyte thumb drives that, even if a copy was left and password protection removed, would be all but inaccessible – no one has time to sort through it all.

I have started to sort files and transfer those I may want to keep. It means going over decades of accumulated stuff, like the clean up of an old house after mom and dad have passed; what to do with all those photos, documents, folders that contain stuff I  may not need anymore but I know contain the answers to questions people ask me – when and where did we do this, or that? I am the embodied institutional memory of MSH’s leadership work – but it is organized in ways that are only meaningful to me.

I was asked to write five to six lines for a communication that will go our to all MSH employees just before my departure. To capture 31 years in five or six lines turned out to be impossible. I ended up writing just about one line for every year, 31 lines, to be edited down as the powers that be see fit.

Although I am at peace with the unthethering, and I have quoted all the things I don’t have to do anymore, there are of course some losses, as there are in any ending. Each thing I refer to as good (not having to commute anymore) contains something I will miss such as the company of colleagues who have become friends, the conversations over our cubicle walls, the walks we take, the stories we share. But then there is Facebook and Linkedin and WhatsApp and we’ll stay in touch.

After a very long run, nearly 32 years, it finally happened: my position at my longtime employer was terminated. After the phone call I was a little dazed, as if I was in the middle of a heavy fog, like the ones I remember from my childhood in wet Holland. And then I started to think about what it all meant. There was a bit of, why me (and then why us when I learned a colleague who does similar work was also let go) but it didn’t last long. It is true, when a door closes, all you need to do is turn around and all sorts of doors appear, some already slightly ajar, and some with the key in the lock, requiring only a simple turn. And then some wide open.

The more I thought about what my new life would be, the more excited I got. I called up people, I posted on facebook and LinkedIn and the requests for my CV and personal email address came flooding in. Best of all, some of those are for assignments I would have loved to take on but couldn’t in the past because I was full-time employed.

And as the days went by more and more doors opened. I can now babysit in the middle of the week, go skiing next winter when the rates are low, mid week. I don’t have to get up at 4:30 anymore; I don’t need to count remaining vacation days and I don’t need to deal with performance reviews and such, corporate requirements that are no longer relevant to me. Freedom and liberation are the operative words. I feel like a kidding a candy store – I can do whatever I want.

After my last day in the office, sometime mid June, I will have just a few days before my first consulting assignment, that was thrown in my lap by a longtime friend from Holland who retired after a career at the WorldBank. We will be together in Saudi Arabia to help the Crown  Prince with the reform and reorganization of the health sector and I get to teach about leadership, change management, emotional intelligence or I know not what. It is very exciting.

I subscribe to a most stimulating yearlong weekly webinar series done for and by coaches. I don’t listen to all of the offerings because the topics isn’t of interest to me, work interferes or I am turned off by the speaker. The latter has happened a few times when a talk is given by older white males who, after a disclaimer that they don’t like to brag, then proceed to tell us about all of their awesome accomplishments. Those I hang up on pretty quickly.

A recent talk on ‘Women Thrive’ was given by Sally Helgesen who coaches women either just below the glass ceiling or on their way, and probably some that smashed through and are now bleeding all over.

Together with a younger colleague we are planning a session at work and take a closer look at the behaviors Helgesen identified over a long career, those that appear to hold women back. We will explore them together and see if there are any that we can de-adopt.

The list contains 12 behaviors that are probably quite familiar to many of us women and probably some men as well – my husband recognizes them too. [Marshall Goldsmith in his book ‘What got you here won’t get there,’ list behaviors that many women I know could not relate to at all.]

One of the behaviors Helgesen has noticed is reluctance to claim one’s achievements. We call it bragging – didn’t I just use that word above? Many men and some women, of the Type A variety, call it ‘listing my achievements.’

We usually expect others to notice what we have done. I learned early on that  ‘good wine (as the wonderful table wine one gets in small French country eateries) does not need a label.’  And when we apply for a job and haven’t exactly done all the things the job is asking for and if we haven’t exactly that experience we may not even apply.

We are good at relationships but don’t leverage them into new work or a promotion because it feels like we are using the relationship for a purpose other than what we thought it was all about.

We are so focused on doing our current job well, being liked by our team that we neglect what we should do to advance (if that is what we want).

We feel everything we do has to be perfect and in so doing fall into the trap of never being good enough. We are too apologetic, sometimes circle too much around a point that our listeners, especially those senior to us, get impatient, and then our radar picks up the slightest facial expressions and body movements and we are thrown off. And then, later, when we feel we messed up, we ruminate. Ruminating comes from what cows do – endlessly chewing over what happened in futile pursuit of trying the change the course of events.

I know all about ruminating. I can still remember events I ruminated over that happened 60, 50 and 40 years ago. I remember the exact feeling I had during those ruminations, the memory tracks very firmly laid down deep in my brain. Quite frequently the rumination was mixed in with jealousy, producing a toxic cud that I kept chewing on. Now that I am studying the brain I am learning the networks in our brain that produce this ruminating – which, not surprisingly, is also related to depression.

I remember (this happened more than 25 years ago) having lost my airline frequent flyer card, the one that allows entry into the short (now red-carpeted) line – when such information wasn’t printed on our tickets quite yet. I had dropped the card while helping a Kenyan woman who was struggling with a toddler and a baby and lots of bags onto the plane by taking over the baby. When preparing my return trip I looked for the card and found it gone. I could not remember the smile on the face of the tired and overwrought mother, the sigh of relief. I could only chew on the lost card – as if I had lost a relative, not being able to stop myself. I finally wrote a poem about it.

Helgesen has given me a new frame and a new vocabulary to put the rumination phenomenon in perspective and detach myself – ahh, that’s what my brain was doing! Now what’s the survival value of that?

Two Losses – poem by a ruminator

There are two kinds of losses/One happens without me/To grieve and sadly mull/But nothing else to contemplate/Until the pain of loss is dull.

And then there is the other kind/Where I am causal link/Something I did or did not do/Which starts off a nearly/endless searching for a clue.

It’s like a film, run in a loop/Replayed a thousand times/The audience is only me/In a frustrating vain attempt/To re-create reality.

Undo my steps this time around/And treasure what is lost/To love and hold it, eyes alert/Erase my mistake just in time/And thereby do the loss avert.

Gets added to the loss and pain/The heavy sighs of guilt/Of that which I cannot erase/The longing sharpened by a knife/The cut I cannot face.

Two losses one of which/A threshold I can’t pass/A voice keeps whispering in my mind/That I brought loss upon myself/I do prefer the other kind.

Our daughter started a reading group online. Every Thursday I receive an automated notice, asking me what thoughts were triggered by people, situations, descriptions in the books I am reading. And since I am a parallel reader, have about 30 of 40 books going more or less actively at any time, I have plenty to choose from. And each time I find connections between books that no one would have guessed. I suppose as you get older, the cacophony of voices and chaos of happenings is no longer as deafening or overwhelming as this used to be because the essential elements are starting to come to the foreground. The background clutter is slowly absorbed into the foreground themes, or simply discarded.

I don’t always respond to the prompt because I am too busy. This is one of those themes, clutter and busy-ness. But I still have a long way to go before the themes merge into one big one, as I see in the books I read – authors have distilled everything into one big theme.  I have a fantasy of writing a book about my experiences in working in public health over the last 40 years but the one theme I need is still elusive.  I keep reading and listening to webinars from people who have figured things out. I sometimes feel sorry for them since they now have to apply their grand theory of everything to everything. I, on the other hand, can cherry pick all the elements that I like – I borrow from this man and that woman and weave these nuggets of wisdom and insights into my practice. And so my journey zigzags along those this one grand theme, or maybe not.

The zigzagging is intellectually satisfying but difficult to match with our organizational practices at headquarters, which aren’t as fluid and look for standardization. I try out new ideas with colleagues and find much resonance, more so with younger folks and with women. The metaphor of atherosclerosis sometimes comes to mind. Or, as I learned during my neuroscience journey this year,  the brain-derived-neurotropic factor (BNDF) gene that provides instructions for making a protein (found in the brain and spinal cord) that promotes the survival of nerve cells by playing a role in the growth, maturation (differentiation), and maintenance of these cells.

So this would be one of the ways I might respond to the weekly prompt – a mishmash of partially developed ideas, surprising metaphors and stimulating conversations.

Emboldened by our entry into serious exercise classes Axel signed up for something called TRX which, if I understand it well, is exercising various muscle groups using elastic bands and your own body as weight.  It is, I told him, a good incentive to lose weight. He was quite crippled the next day but then the painful memory faded. I think he is going to do it again, much like I will spin again tomorrow morning at 6AM.  Saffi and Faro should be quite impressed with their opa and oma.

We celebrated Jim’s not quite 40 birthday in Easthampton on Friday. We drove west while the Nor’Easter pummeled the eastern seaboard.  This morning we came back to survey the damage on our peninsula. It was bad. There were flooded areas everywhere. Many trees and several piers had not been able to withstand the force of the wind and water. They were broken like match sticks or carted off into the sea.

Our neighbors now have an enormous tree trunk in their yard which we used to sit on by the fire last summer. The January 2018 storm moved it to the other side of the cove and this storm brought it back again but not quite. It got deposited in the middle of their yard. It is not the kind of tree trunk that you can pick up with a few strong arms. It will require machinery. Our neighbor’s entire lawn has been inundated, water lapped at their foundation; the incoming water smashed onto their lawn, taking large rocks the size of frozen chickens and dropping them left and right. It also ripped up most of the beach roses (rosae rugosae) that were so neatly planted along the sea wall. Then, when receding as the tide went out, it took as much sand as it could find, leaving the seawall rocks without its natural cement and scouring the beach down to its gravel base.

Our seaside has also been scoured and hollowed out, but the large pine trees held, their roots doing their job at least on the land side. But we can no longer walk as close to the edge as we used to, dropping our yard waste off the edge. It could collapse any moment, reducing our land by yet another yard or so.