Sylvia's Journal

I finished my writing assignment at 5 minutes after 5PM. It was a long haul on a very hot and muggy day. It is the first draft only. I will have another week to write improve on it when I come back from South Africa. That trip starts the day after tomorrow. I have to shift my focus to that assignment and will do so during the very long trip from Boston to Atlanta to Johannesburg.

But first I am going to focus on tomorrow. Tomorrow is July 14 – it will be five years since we fell out of the sky, a black day that was otherwise a New England 10+ day. It was also a Saturday. We now know what will and what will not get better. For me this knowledge (that some things – ankle/arm – won’t get better) is fairly recent– for Axel it is old news (brain/arm). Although we will have to get used to living with some degree of handicap, living at all remains rather miraculous.

We declined to go to the ’14 juillet’ party that we were supposed to attend five years ago. We could just imagine the conversation and didn’t want any part of that. Instead we are going to a ‘diner blanc’ with tons of other people in Gloucester; my first time, Axel’s second. I watched this picture of this event last year, all homesick and wishing I could have been there. Now I will be.

We will join 7 other friends for this fest that was invented some 25 years ago in Paris. It is a sort of pop-up dinner party where everyone is dressed in white and brings in everything that they need for dinner (tables, chairs, plates, silverware, tablecloth, decorations, candles and of course food) and when all is consumed they pack everything up leaving nothing behind.

For the first time in a month we are alone and there are no significant events on the horizon, other than watching Faro grow and one short trip for me. We have the house all to ourselves.

The debris from the party have been cleared away, the bottles and cans recycled and Axel is trying to revive the grass dance floor with an overdose of water. Tessa cleaned the floors before hopping on a plane to Florida for a week with her in-laws.

I am returning to my morning routines, abandoned when Faro announced himself five weeks ago.  This includes meditation, lots of water and a diet that did me much good – better than the take out, the pizza, sausages, ice cream and birthday cake from the last few weeks.

I am also returning to a strict discipline of writing one session a day for an e-learning course on change – the first draft should be done by the end of the week.  It’s a little easier to do this at home than at work because in the office there are so many distractions, other stuff to do.

As part of the writing process I am doing a lot of reflection on my own recent change experiences and am finally able to take some distance, look at myself as an observer. As I write about the stages of change, of grieving and loss I recognize every step of the way. Observed experience makes it easier to write about change.

This morning I organized a demonstration for my colleagues in Arlington and Cambridge of a group facilitation tool that I was introduced to only 10 days ago. It helps people who may or may not be in the same place find meaning in the chaotic events and complexity of our times by thinking better together. I added some complexity on my own by trying to getting colleagues who reside in several Southern African countries in on the demo.  I was only partially successful and learned a lesson or two about working with technology from a distance.

Last year I looked wistfully at pictures of Tessa’s birthday beach party, an annual event, on facebook, while sitting at my little China-made desk in my bedroom of house 33 in Karte seh in Kabul, Afghanistan.

I saw pictures that needed an explanation: people in weird poses on our kitchen floor, everyone with a headset on. Axel explained: this was silent disco; they were dancing to wicked good music. A friend of Tessa and Steve is a sought-after disc jockey on the Boston club scene. He graciously offered to come and DJ at her party last year, bringing lots of headsets so the neighborhood wouldn’t know that a disco party was going on. He did so again this year and I got to be in it rather than looking in from the outside.

Whoever came up with the silent disco idea is a genius. If you take your headset off there is no music. And so you can dance on loud music if you want, alone or with others, and if you want to have a conversation you simply take the headset off. I thought of our conversations yesterday about insights and innovation: someone made an “either/or” into an “and/and.” You can have your cake (loud music) and eat it too (have a conversation), AND all this without pissing off the neighbors.

Axel had been dreading the party a bit – in litigious America having 30 to 40 young people on your property, mix in much beer and stronger stuff that slips in unnoticed, along with random people you don’t know is a risky thing. Besides, his recliner is in the living room. Tessa responded very wisely to these concerns by telling her friends to bring a tent or sleeping bag and stay the night and not allowing strangers to tag along with friends, unless explicit permission was provided by her (in case of new partners).

By looking out of the window I can see, judging from the number of cars still on our property, that many heeded the suggestion of staying for the night. Those who left will miss out on one of the best experiences Lobster Cove can offer: waking up on a sunny Sunday morning and then have Tessa and Steve cook a hearty breakfast and eat it on the beach.

Tessa also had some strong young men take the recliner up to our bedroom. And so we are for the first time in nearly a month sleeping in the same room again. This vacated the living room and made it, with all the other rooms downstairs available for overnighters without a tent: there are couches and Afghan carpets, and, after a brief inspection this morning, there are people using them.

We did not last very long into the night – we are after all more than double the age of most – but we had a great time hanging out around the fire and then dancing with our head phones on. Our daughters have wonderful friends. They are in a stage of life where engagements, weddings and jobs are the subject of most conversations. There were serious talks about getting, having and leaving jobs, or mates for that matter; and wistful conversations about travelling (they had done, or wished they had done).

But they also wanted to know about us, with lots of questions about Axel’s arm in the sling, why the rotator cuff operation, why Afghanistan, the plane crash. Some were actually following my blog and knew a lot about our lives. At times Axel started to talk about something we did, and was greeted with the words, “oh, we know all about that already!” But some things don’t go in the blog and so there remains much to talk about.

It is Sunday morning now and, after a brief inspection of the after-party debris, I went back upstairs to reminisce about my 27^th summer which took place in Beirut, 33 years ago. I realized that some things don’t change. I too was in the middle of a transition then, of both jobs and mates and about to start on the trip of a life time, with Axel, to Afghanistan.

On Saturday morning, at dead low tide, Axel and I walked across the near empty cove to inspect whether the mussels that Roger and Axel had transplanted from Ipswich some two weeks ago, had settled into their new home. We found them happily sticking to rocks and each other. The experiment seems to have been successful and we are proud of our mussel heroes: they are tasked with repopulating the cove with their species. We are ready for phase II – another transplant.

The clear water allowed us to inspect the aquatic life in the cove. We saw new kinds of seaweeds, one that fills like a bladder when under water, with a bubble of air providing a bright contrast at the top of the green slimy thing. It’s everywhere now where three years ago there were none.

A kind of snail shell, maybe another variety of the hermit crab, is also more abundant than before and then there is the invading red algae that are choking some of the other seaweeds in the cove.

We were happy to see two small lobsters poking out from under a rock, menacingly raising their tiny claws up to us in a defensive attack stance. One medium sized crab walked across the bottom with a small squid under its arm – the large eye of the squid looking like a jewel on a white gown.  Unfortunately the crab met another crab without a squid and a deadly attack (for the squid) ensued. I could hear them screaming ‘It’s mine, I found it,” and “I want it and I am bigger than you so I will take it away.”

Hordes of little hermit crabs converged around the fighters. They knew that in the end they would be the winners, catching the shreds from the poor squib that was torn into pieces as each crab was trying to gobble up as much of the squid. Soon there would be nothing left to fight over.  We left the crabs to themselves and headed back to shore for a breakfast of freshly picked Swiss chard mixed in with freshly laid eggs from a nearby chicken farm. Life is good and about to get even better.

For more than a decade my work took places in the interstices of three states of mind: purpose, passion and playfulness. I had a faded yellow post-It Note with these three words on the cork board in my office. I threw it out when I packed up for Afghanistan, now nearly three years ago. I threw it out because I needed no reminding – in my work I attended to all three, automatically.

Little did I know that I would lose this approach to my work. I lost the passion (mostly because a change in the nature of my work); I lost a sense of purpose because the enormity of the task and the complexity of the environment in which we worked with its countless tradeoffs between getting work done and maintaining relationships; and there was little room for playfulness – I tried in my first year but could not find allies. Playfulness and war zones don’t go together.

I now look back on my return to the US and to headquarters and realize I was deeply depressed because, maybe, I had lost these three anchors. I was depressed (now obvious but not then), highly vulnerable and found myself in an environment that approached depression with the exhortation: ‘get over it and be positive.’  A windowless office did not help. All it did was produce more tears.

For the last 9 months, starting about the time that Sita got pregnant, I have been looking. Now she has a baby but I still come up empty. Luckily that baby makes up for much of the unhappiness I have been experiencing but I am still looking for that corner to round and find my lost anchors.

Yesterday I was asked by a colleague in Washington to take her place at an event in the Boston area with the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL). It was a small intimate affair with Peter Senge of Learning Organization fame, Charlie Kiefer of Innovation Associates and people from the Foodlab and RIOS involved in global change efforts.

I had to dislodge myself on a beautiful afternoon from Lobster Cove, with Axel and Peter deeply immersed in holiday making on the beach, to drive 45 minutes away from the ocean to the Doubletree Hotel off route 3. I am glad I did. It was worth it.

A session on how do we get insights was both affirming and a wake up call; meeting the folks who are doing things that are even more complex than working in Afghanistan (reframing the electrical grid, the way food arrives on our table, lifting thousands of villages in the Philippines out of deep and grinding poverty) gave me hope and inspiration – there are 1000s of people around the world who are deeply committed to making the world a better place; a handful were in the room. I saw a glimmer of my own passion and purpose, still not within reach, but re-appearing like stars at dusk.

We are experiencing the chaos and messiness of a summer with friends, our own, Tessa’s and Sita’s. There is much sand in the house. There are empty and half finished beer bottles everywhere and all the towels are trying to dry in the great humidity of the season. It requires some lowering of standards but it is worth it to me. I often think about last year when Axel lived this life here while I was counting days in Kabul. It’s good to be home.

Axel still sleeps in the recliner, after several failed attempts to return to his own bed at night. Last night I kept him company on the couch, after having ceded our bedroom to Faro and his parents – I do anything to have them stay another day. The guestroom is occupied by Axel’s Beirut housemate, Peter, who is here for a two day visit from England.

I went back to work this week, sort of. Monday was Tessa’s birthday with an impromptu pre-birthday party (the big one is this Saturday) and Axel and me paying attention to car matters. I still drive Axel around although he is itching to climb behind the wheel now. This dependency thing is not so great after a while.

The fourth, a midweek holiday, we spent mostly with Sita and Faro. Sita and Jim dropped one ‘r’ from his name so he is no longer named after a grain.  Faro is Portuguese for beacon I gather, or headlight (phares in French).  People ask about the spelling. He is not a Pharaoh.

I missed the 4^th of July town parade because I was having quality time with Faro – an easy choice. We partook in the annual lunch at a friend’s house and then joined Sita, Faro and Jim are his other grandparents’ house for more baby-holding, cooing and feeding.

Faro now eats, or rather drinks like a wolf and is visibly gaining weight, his ribs no longer ending in a hollow lower belly and not protruding as much as they did a week ago. He is still nursing but it seems that the formula is his predominant source of food now.  This means we can all pitch in with the feeding and give Sita some well-deserved rest. He received a Grateful Dead teeshirt with Peace, Love and Lobstah icons on the belly. If he keeps up the drinking he may wear this before the winter.

Last night Faro went to his first rock concert – a band at Castle Hill played Rolling Stonesque music while we kept the mosquitoes and ear wicks at bay. I imagine that next year he would find the concert more interesting. We watched one and two-year olds frolicking on picnic blankets and having a good time. Faro declined the sandwiches–sur-l’herbe and was happy with milk, from whatever source. After that he looked around him with big eyes, everything is new and full of wonder. Did he hear the music? I wondered.

We have decided to accompany Sita on her first work outing, to Bellagio (Italy) no less. I am busy negotiating with Italians about renting a place to stay in early September. More and more people want to come along – not surprising once you start looking at the pictures of Lake Como and surroundings.

A full week of vacation, with nary a look into my Outlook in box – this is unchartered territory. I loved it. Although the week was full of rain and overcast skies, vacation it remained and included some spectacular meals, good company and a little too much wine.

Wednesday evening our house guest cooked a Bolognese dinner that required some extra mouths. They arrived as if summoned. Our new neighbors showed up with a box full of chocolates right after dinner and shared with us their plans for the house. To our great relief they are not tearing it down although the renovations and additions will probably produce some construction noise during this summer. The only summers without construction noise were the ones we missed.

Thursday we cruised the Essex River and landed on a sand bank for a light lunch followed by a swim until the sand bank disappeared. In the evening we had cocktails at Tessa’s tiny deck, followed by a Rudder dinner in Gloucester where Steve joined us.

Friday was for forgotten vacation projects, a last chance. I removed the runner that Rita (from Rwanda) and I braided many years ago, removed the dog hairs on the back and stitched back together the loose strands. We had one pair of Sita’s in laws over for cocktails and sat outside until the mosquitoes took over the place. We had our first corn of the year, not quite local, and more scallops and shrimps, a summer meal that I can repeat over and over again.

And now it is Saturday and we are going to see our grandchild again, after two weeks. That will be the grand finale of my vacation week.