Sylvia's Journal

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.

One comes to New Orleans for the trio of food, drinks and music; this is not usually the kind of vacation I take.  The food part of the trio is always there, the drinks less (I generally don’t do cocktails) and we rarely go out to listen to music back home or on vacation. But here I am getting into this wonderful combination of the three: we eat very well, we try out all sorts of interesting cocktails and we listen to music.

Of course there is music everywhere: on the streets, in restaurants, in historic settings and in clubs or dance halls. We have found our favorite place, Snug Harbor, which is indeed a snug little place with small chairs and tiny round tables and a small stage.

After a fabulous show earlier this week at Snug Harbor of Mahmoud Chouki, we returned to see one member of the Marsalis Family (Delfeayo) with his big band on the tiny stage. It was a most playful and enjoyable show of brass band artistry.

Compared with the soulless and uninspired performance at Preservation Hall (a tourist attraction), this was how music should be played – to the enjoyment of players and listener alike. At the end three high school students from Little Rock were invited onto the stage to join the band and show off their talents with their baritone sax, alto sax and trombone. You could see that this was a rather nerve-wrecking experience for them – they could not yet be playful like the established players.

Delfeayo  and the members of his band showed me how they were mentoring the next generation of great jazz musicians – talking to them with their eyes as jazz players do, and encouraging them to stand up and play their solos. I was very impressed, these kids are talented. I imagined them being big fish in their Little Rock high school, going to swim in the big pond with the real big fish.

There was much joking about the boys’ hometown (‘country boys’) and the clothes they wore (sneakers, one with a hat and dreadlocks and T-shirts).  The band members all wore coats and most of them ties as well.  Still, you could tell there was also great respect. Later one of the players told us that this is now what he lives for – passing the baton and grooming the next generation of great jazz players.

The first snow has just started to fall, on the wintry December 10 day. I was just in time planting 20 tiny Winter Aconaite (Eranthis) bulbs. They look like nothing, little shriveled up dark things that blend in with the debris from frantic squirrel activity over the last few months. As I was digging small holes in different parts of the yard I always found nuts from this or that tree that had already claimed the space. It is rather amazing how the squirrels remember where they put stuff. We would call that smarts, but I am not sure what it means for animals.

I am listening to a book about cephalopods, among them octopus, giant squid and tiny squid. It is a philosophical treatise about consciousness and what the amazing behavior of cephalopods teaches us about consciousness. As with most books I am reading or listening to these days, it is about the brain. But the brain and nervous system of the octopus is, I learn, not in the head but all over the body. In my coaching course the word ‘embodiment’ is often used and I am trying to figure out what that means for us humans – but for the octopus it is clear. The body and brain are one. And maybe we are like that too, as there are neurons (some 500 million) in our gut and (less) in our heart. And neural activity takes of course also place in our small toe.