Sylvia's Journal

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.

I signed Axel and myself up for an introductory Spinning class. Axel might not have considered it but there is strength in numbers. I had always been a little intimidated when I walked by the dimly lit classroom with its cheek-to-jowl stationary bikes, the high pitched teacher exhorting the class to go for the gold and the thump-thump music.

The room was full on the appointed hour early on Saturday. There were others like us, intimidated and waiting for a gentle introduction. All but one of the room full of bikes were occupied. It took about 30 minutes to get us all to figure out the adjustments of the bikes to our bodies and set up and understand the electronics that would provide us with the data points during and after our ride (for monitoring and evaluation purposes).

We spent the remaining 30 minutes biking level, downhill, and uphill with our rides illustrated on an enormous screen (12 connected flat TV screens), showing where we were biking. Sometimes we cruised down or jogged up (standing on the pedals) a paved road in the French or Swiss Alps, sometimes we were on sandy or gravel paths in a national park someplace – scenes that looked vaguely familiar, reminiscent of the beaches at Cape Cod. One ride I thought I recognized, along the coastal path at Sea Ranch in California which we ambled two years ago with our two grandchildren, looking for seals. There are also paths through jungles, over narrow bridges or weaving along pedestrians or hikers. We never stayed consistently on one route which may have confused our well trained brains a bit. But I liked the variation because if you climb up to an Alpine summit it is not only exhausting but the scenery can get a bit boring.

In our artificial and electronic environment everything was possible: the teacher would switch easily from beach to jungle to dunes to daredevil rides down ski slopes, when the interval asked for a different effort. She adjusted the thump-thump music which made me adjust my RPMs. Sometimes there was neither path nor trail and we jumped several yards down rocky outcrops, me on my mountain bike. It helped with the distraction of staying in the green, yellow or red zone displayed on our small monitors. If you go really hard and expending more effort than you have in you, you get a ring of fire first and then you are sucked into a red tunnel – the graphic artists of the bike company had fun creating the screens.

The introductory class lowered my adoption-of-a-new-behavior threshold: this morning at 6AM I was ready for a full hour workout even though I was still a little intimidated for my ride in the big league. Thirty minutes is the most I ever do on the stationary bike in my (home) office. But there is no thump-thump music (I listen to books) and I don’t do any intervals, biking at a comfortable steady pace. I prepared the teacher for the possibility of sneaking out after 30 minutes who said, “no problem as long as you don’t forget to stretch!” But fitness teachers don’t give in to defeat that easily and told me to simply reduce my effort when it got too much. Giving up so easily simply didn’t seem an option anymore.

I am proud to say that I biked up a few steep sloped and reached one summit in the Alps, cruised along some lovely scenery, sometimes at a very high speed. I completed 18.4 miles. Now that I know I can I have made the 6AM Monday morning session a recurrent appointment with myself on my Google calendar.

What is quite an accomplishment for me is nothing for my 70+ year old brother who actually bikes across the Alps on a real bike, for many multiples of 18 miles daily. He has no qualms about bicycling from Holland to Slovenia (over the Alps) or the land of the Basques (over the Pyrenees) and is now dreaming of a trip from Holland to Athens.  I am usually better at long plane rides.

I finally returned to work midweek with an energy that surprised me. During my sick days I had been doing some work, deadlines that couldn’t be relaxed and a few ‘throw ideas around’ kind of meetings. I had felt low in energy but something in my brain was chewing at stuff that circulated in the background.

In the book ‘The Net and the Butterfly’ the authors created one of the most memorable descriptions of the workings of the two different modes of the brain, the Default Network (DN) and the Executive Network (EN). The default network consist of a team of creative types – I would like to hope that my team includes Margaret Sanger, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Florence Nightingale, John Stewart, Amelia Earhart and Leonardo. The energy sucked up by my frontal lobes when my executive function is in charge, dims the lights in the room where my creatives sit, a windowless den deep inside my brain.

When I am asleep or not working on tasks my creative teams is busy, each with their own ideas. Amelia is plotting her next route and thinking about the tradewinds, Leonardo is fixing those hairs of Mona for the umpteenth time, Franklin is looking for sockets to plug in his latest invention, Stewart is watching Fox News for ideas and Jobs is exploring how to get Corning to make indesctructible glass for his new phone.

My executive, when awake but not on task, sometimes makes a visit to the den and finds empty pizza boxes, dirty cups, crumbs on the table, torn napkins with scribbles and pictures that hint at what went on during the night. But most of the time it’s simply and only a mess.  What was missing was a sense of direction for the creatives to work on something together, as a team, and only the EN can provide that.

After I returned to work that direction emerged. Maybe it surfaced when I cleaned up the den. I left instructions on te clean table: when the lights go on, start working on this. I know I can count on each of you to bring your specific talents to the task. I know you can bring attention to currents (AE), detail (LdV), novelty (BF), laser focus (MS), appeal, esthetics (SJ), and absurdity (JS). They did set to work on solving this wicked problem: how can we in the development community help our counterparts who really do want the health system to function at the highest possible levels, to remove all the gunk that keeps it (or them) from doing so.

And so when I arrived back at work I was boiling over with ideas, insights and what if scenarios. I intercepted any person in my cubicle neighborhood who had time to listen to ply my ideas. And as I was talking I refined coarse ideas and even put some in writing. Instead of lamenting how bored I was (I had been before I got sick – a coincidence?) I started calling people, checking out breadcrumbs left by Steve Jobs whose biography I am listening to, and seeing possibilities where I had seen only failures before.

This whole experience reminded me of why being with your nose to the grindstone is not good because you can only see what’s right in front of you. This is why taking a walk in the woods is always a good thing and why we should preserve woods in the first place.

Axel’s loving care, Sita’s herbal concoctions (mullein, ginger, elderberry) and Tessa’s sick tea recipe (lemon, ginger, apple cider, garlic and cayenne), nursed me back to health. I felt good enough for an early morning swim, twice, but that backfired (or something else did) and triggered a bad cold. I was a very unpleasant house mate, coughing my brains out and spitting gunk out of my lungs but the fever was gone. I was grateful for working at a place where it is encouraged to stay at home when sick and discouraged to return prematurely, with plenty of sick leave available to recover at my body’s own pace.

On Sunday we gathered at the house of friends to say farewell to a tree that was filled with memories, insects, furry animals, and viral and/or fungal agents slowly contributing to its demise. It also stood in the way of a solar panel project and thus had to go. There was poetry and storytelling, there was a photo display from long ago, and much touching of the tree as if saying goodbye to a friend on her deathbed.

The next day we walked by the house and there was no trace of the tree – every bit of it was gone. Now the solar panels could march in and take their place on the roof, unimpeded by an old sick tree.

We arrived back in the US on a blue sky day – it is always nice to arrive like that. We went for a long walk to stretch our legs. Little did I know that the flu virus had already nestled inside me. On Thursday I was a bit listless and tired, which I chalked up to jetlag, on Friday I started to feel rotten and on Saturday and Sunday I was sick as a dog with a fever, coughing fits, a headache and all the symptoms that have been listed for this year’s flu season.

I thought I had escaped the virus, thinking because I had had the flu vaccine I would be spared. But no such luck. Axel also didn’t feel so great on Friday night but an 11 hour sleep was all that it took. He was able right away to dive into town affairs by attending various meetings about the new elementary school, and then watching ‘the game’ which apparently the New England team lost – a big deal here, though not so much for me.

Sita and Tessa are cheering me on via Facetime and texts, plying me with all sorts of home remedies, such as a hot lemon brew with ginger, cayenne and garlic, elderberry/flower concoctions, mullein and what not. I am drinking all day long, these and other concoctions, believing in both modern and traditional approaches. I’d like to think I am bit better, though the thermometer still registers a fever.

I am starting to have more energy so I am able to catch up on reading materials that have piled up next to my desk, on my night table and in our living room, but not enough to start a knitting project quite yet.

It has been a month since we returned from New Orleans. I have only thought about my journal, not written. I was reminded of that by a friend this morning. I now will leap over an entire month, skimming the peaks of great experiences, missing the valleys.

Christmas came and went, and once again I vowed to be out of the country or at least out of Massachusetts for the entire month of December in 2018. I have set my eyes on South East Asia. I am going to put aside some money every month so that we can enjoy our month outside the US, ideally in a place that is warmer. It is hard to escape Christmas around the world; even in Afghanistan Santa was omnipresent, but as our New Orleans experience showed us, not being ‘at home’ makes Christmas palatable.

January has come in with a vengeance, the coldest weather I can remember. We were lucky that none of the storms knocked out our electricity and so we stayed warm and comfortable. We did go skiing one weekend, at our favorite NH cross-country ski area in Jackson, staying at the lovely Thorn Hill Inn, one of those selfish Christmas presents we give to each other. It was bitter cold but we have all the right clothes now.

It was the first time in one or two years we tried skiing again and I was a little worried about the problematic left ankle and Axel about circulation. I can no longer do the skate skiing that reminded me of the ice skating in Holland of many decades ago. And so I had to change skies. I tried out some demos and am now set up with a pair that puts Axel and me on roughly the same rhythm and speed. We skied a little on day one, to get used to the exercise, and then more the second day. It was wonderful to be out in nature for so many hours and be active. We vowed we will do more of it in February and have secured a place to stay with friends, further west in New Hampshire.

Sita gave me an introduction to glassworks for Christmas. yesterday was my class. I learned how to make beads and now have a better understanding how some of my African beads are made. I did not see the final products, don’t even remember how many I made, because the completed beads went straight into the kiln for drying, even before the colors emerged from the cooling glass. It was a lot of fun. I decided I want to go back an take another class and learn how to make marbles.

And now we are keeping our fingers crossed that the flu virus, which wrestled Sita and her family down, did not come visit us with them this weekend.  Saffi threw up several times during the night and so is not out of the woods while her mom and dad are still recovering. We don’t want to be the ones that take the virus across the Atlantic when we leave for a week of Holland on Wednesday. So far we have weathered the onslaught – hopefully the flu shots gave us at least some protection.