Sylvia's Journal

This weekend, this part of the year, is full of sweet memories that keep reproducing themselves. Easter 1978 was the beginning of our life together that started in Beirut. The notion of Easter and New Beginnings is not a cliché for us. It was a time of painful endings and hesitant new beginnings, feeling our way into a new chapter that turned out to be very long.

We are celebrating all that in the best possible way this weekend. Yesterday was a day that stretched on and on to accommodate all that we wanted it to hold: a quiet morning curled up on the couch in front of a fire with a wonderful history book, The Peabody Sisters. Phonecalls with my sister and my niece who is in the hospital in Leiden.

We played with the puppy outside on that wonderful spring day; breaking the twigs off the fallen tree for fire starters; raking and uncovering the new sprouts, and having a lunch en plein air.

And although I hesitated a moment about joining everyone on a bike ride to the beach, I am glad that my sanity kicked in and I postponed the work to be done till later.

We walked on Singing Beach as dog owners, a very different experience than walking there dog less (actually, we don’t walk there at all even though it is minutes away from our house). You discover that there is much socializing but it is done on dog terms (we play, you stay). There is a battle brewing in town between dog owners and those who abhor the messiness of dogs and want to close the beach forever to these creatures, all year round.

And then there was still time for more play outside with the puppy, throwing and fetching sticks and balls. Sita and Tessa invited friends over for a taco meal. Roy went on a shopping expedition and cooked assisted by Tessa, Steve and Axel while Sita kept the puppy busy and I got to finish the work I had to do before Monday. And still there was time. Sean, whose family owns a bakery on Western Massachusetts, arrived with a huge Easter loaf. We crowded down around the table and gorged ourselves on tacos with all the fixings.

And still there was time for playing cards, making deserts and Irish coffee and meeting one of the Roller Derbie stars, Maura Buse, whose real name is Ellie, Fred’s girl friend.

And then there was still time for reading and going to bed at a decent hour. What a day!

The only thing I remember from my dreams was about text aligning, endless pages, in Times New Roman even though I wanted Arial. There were no memorable feelings attached and it wasn’t important. Today I will put those documents I have been working on to bed, hopefully, for awhile.

I found a message in my email from one of our participants in a virtual program we did with Iraqi doctors. He invited me to his Facebook page. Imagine that! I had resisted joining Facebook until now but that email compelled me to sign up. If he can do it, and feel sufficiently safe, why not? The force towards removal of boundaries continues relentlessly and this seems another sign that it is unstoppable, even by the evil people (you-know-who) our president is combating so valiantly

Some time ago I had set up a lunch with two women, Susana and Sandra, who both teach about moral leadership; one does it from the ivory tower of Harvard, to the elite and the well off, while the other does it in small villages in Nicaragua, Guinea and Peru. It seemed a good idea to bring these two women together. It meant that I would not have the entire Friday to focus on work but it was the only day that worked for all of us, and, being the connector I am, it fell in the realm of worthy causes. I got into my car and drove to Cambridge where I only found Susana who is my colleague and with whom I could have had lunch any day, not requiring the sacrifice of my precious work-at-home day. At first I was annoyed about Sandra not showing up but then remembered something that Joan used to say a lot, we plan, and God laughs. Not only did I have a wonderful lunch with Susana, I also decided to forget about the work planned for the afternoon and join Axel, Tessa and Steve at the Institute for Contemporary Art in its new home at the Boston waterfront. We had a great time. Of course I had to make up for this indulgence later at home, but it was worth every minute of it.

Tessa went off to celebrate her best friend’s 30^th birthday, at a surprise party and the main reason for her quick visit to Manchester, while Steve waited for Roy (his buddy who made the tiny ramp into my sickroom some 8 months ago) and then left to see friends in Everett, taking dog Chicha along.

London and sleeps, with her Jim, across the driveway, while Tessa, Steve, Chicha, Axel and Roy are sleeping upstairs. All is peaceful, even the storm of yesterday has gone. I think I’ll start a fire and curl up with a book.

I started off the day with Obama’s speech for breakfast; food for the soul. It was the speech he made on Tuesday in Philadelphia. I listened to the entire speech while reading along with the text. It was a feast for the ears, less so for the eyes, so the YouTube video itself did little for me. The speech inspired and moved me and then moved everyone in the nation to speculate about its effect on the elections. I liked his refreshing proposal to talk about race relations. What he proposes is that we engage in productive conversations. Since that (productive conversations) is my life’s work, it resonated deeply with me.

Tessa, Steve and their fast growing puppy Chicha arrived last night just when Jim and I were getting to the final untangling of intrigue and misrepresentation by Hercule Poirot in another one of Agatha’s brilliant mysteries. That will have to wait. The puppy bounced into the house, followed by two tired drivers. They made the long trip from the Canadian London in less than 11 hours, bad weather all the way. So our house is full again; Sita’s return from the other London on Friday will complete the picture.

I dragged myself into the house only two hours earlier after a much too long day at work. My departure date of March 26 looms large, not negotiable at this point. The program for Kabul is asking for my attention. But I am not ready yet; there is much still on my desk(top) that needs to be removed.

In between the oatmeal and coffee I tried to call my niece Emilie who is in the hospital in Holland to find out how she is doing and whether she wants the book back that she sent us last summer (the Art of Idleness). I have a feeling that she could use it now. I may bring it along when I leave for Holland next Wednesday. She did not answer her phone. Cellphones are nice but they make us overconfident in our ability to reach someone, no matter where he or she is. I failed in that just now.

Last night, when Tessa and Steve had arrived I called Axel to tell him so but failed to reach him (those cellphones again). Jim had to go into town and fish him out of our local pub – it sounds so Irish, it must be the St. Pat’s day afterglow – where Woody and Gary and comrades had taken him after some town event or another. It is the usual route after every such town event. Since the accident it is not half as much fun for Axel, especially when your wife tells you ‘only non-alcoholic beer!’ I never checked and suspect he had something else. Are we acting out some age old script?

Today will not be a workday in the usual sense. A non-profit arm of a for-profit consulting group has offered to do some pro-bono work with our senior managers, that includes me, around conflict management. Such things are good for a bunch of people who thrive on harmony. It will be nice to be on the participant side of things for a change and I hope to pick up some new ideas. However, it also blows an entire work day for which I will have to pay later, no doubt.

For once Tessa does not need to read my blog to find out how I am doing. It has been the main source of information about her parents, maybe providing more information than she cares to get. For the next few days we can show and tell rather than write and read.

I have been working as if I were on fast train speeding towards completion. Axel had to shake me out of my trance and drag me outside for a walk. That was a good idea. It is amazing how fast a day goes by when you are on such a fast track one rail train. This is the third day in a row. I decided to stay home today so I could stay on this one track. In Cambridge that would not be possible. One week from now I will be packing my suitcase for Afghanistan. It signifies a hard stop for many things that I am trying to get off my plate; stuff I cannot postpone, things that have been patiently waiting for my attention since October but now the patience is gone.

As a result I am totally attached to my computer for 9 to 10 hours a day. I realize how risky that is. The possibility of a computer crash is the scariest thing I can imagine. So from time to time I send myself an email with the file I am working on attached. Just in case my faithful but old computer collapses, which it does in minor ways from time to time; luckily nothing that a re-boot cannot solve. So far, all has been well.

The intense work shows up in my dreams as Word document files that come to life in ways I cannot remember but faintly feel, the way I imagine one could feel synaptic connections in the brain; small recognizable bits that travel hither and dither along old and new paths, line up in columns or justified paragraphs. There is more but I lose it if I don’t write it down immediately upon waking.

Axel and I walked to the library and back. We refused a ride offered very nicely by a tired and worn Woody who has just completed two weeks at the Boston Flower Show. We explained that this was our constitutional, a health thing, and an important distraction.

When we came home the house smelled great. Jim had made a Curry Fish Chowder, a wonderful combination of the best of India and New England. We could eat fish because Sita is in London. She won’t be able to smell the fish and so we take advantage of her absence. The only thing that is good about her being away.

Tessa is coming home tomorrow for a short Easter visit with Steve and the new puppy Chicha. Both girls will be coming back from Londons, Tessa from the Ontario one and Sita from the real London. By Friday night our little family will be complete again, like we were last summer and over Christmas. This is another reason why I am trying to get as much work off my plate as possible. It would be hard to have to work when everyone is hanging out in the living room within earshot of my office. I can be pretty disciplined but that would be a bit of a challenge.

The reflection of the sun in the Putnam windows caught me straight in the eye. Before it woke me up it mingled with a theme in my dream that was about doing several things concurrently. Holding the sun in my eye and continuing the dream turned out to be too much. Wanting to, but not able to do several things at the same time is probably an accurate description of my state of mind as it relates to my workload. I have to be creative, and ask for help, in order to manage. I tell Axel to do this, so why not apply it to myself.

Yesterday I took over the facilitation of the virtual leadership course from Morsi. He has been facilitating the course for three weeks non stop and was rather tired. Taking over meant that I had to review all that had happened in the last three weeks, where each team (of 11) is, checking correspondence, their progress on tasks, etc. The module I am leading will continue till the 28^th of March, when I will already be on my way to Kabul. That too I have to sort out.

There are two other virtual events that are happening or in preparation that ask for my full attention plus a whole host of non virtual stuff that require writing, thinking, designing, telephoning, etc. At times I feel like I am skating on the edge of panic. The feeling was intense enough yesterday that I decided to reserve all of Tuesday for another day of working at home. I get more done that way, being able to have long stretches of time during which I can work without interruption, something that is impossible when I go in to my office. Working from home also saves me two hours of commuting time for more productive use. Why not work from home all the time? Some of the work is being in meetings and I do love working with my colleagues and hearing the stories of people coming or going. I missed that part of my work from July till November and it is one of the reasons I do not want to be a consultant.

Yesterday afternoon Axel and I went for a walk around the loop again, hoping that it would get Axel’s muscles out of their knots. He continues to be in pain and we keep trying to figure out what happened that caused all this. Today he will see his physical therapist again and we hope the visit will bring some relief.

After our walk, in between snow and sleet an hour of mild spring weather seduced me into the garden where I started to clean out the winter debris. There are tiny green sprouts poking out of the ground everywhere; the onions are already half a foot high and one tiny Swiss Chard plant has survived the winter. If last year the garden was abundant, this year it is going to be magnificent. After I had removed the debris I stood for awhile, leaning on the rake, surveying my handiwork and contemplating this little patch so full of promise. I know this, but have to re-discover it again and again, that gardening – or any physical activity for that matter – is a good way to subdue waves of panic and neuter the stress that comes with it.

I woke up in time to write but stayed in bed until there was no more time. With this I squandered the chance to write in great detail about my dreams that included a trip with Joellen to somewhere that took forever to get started and some brilliant thoughts about my work. These have gone back to the place where all the other brilliant thoughts live, in complete obscurity and irretrievable.

I biked to Quaker meeting and counted the empty beer cans along the way. If I were to pick up all the empties, in each direction, it could buy me one gallon of orange juice each month; there is money lying on the street! It makes you wonder what happens at night on these stretches of road.

Our youngest Quaker attender was 2 weeks old, little Gemma Louise. She handled the one hour silence like a pro. I suppose that after 9 months of silence in utero, this one hour is not much of a challenge.

While riding my bike I thought much about cleaning and clearing out clutter, an ancient spring ritual that is badly needed in our house. Back home I added deed to word and started un-cluttering a very small space. It quickly became a silver cleaning chore and took much longer than intended. In the end, I realized I was just moving clutter from one place of the house to another. There is a system dynamic at work that is stronger than my or Axel’s will; it is much like putting a policeman in one neighborhood to discourage criminal activity and the crime simply moves to the next neighborhood.

I did throw out some little things without asking permission. No one will notice the missing pieces of glass, rock, sand dollars and other neat stuff that, I know, will automatically slip back into our house as soon as someone comes back from the beach.

Yesterday we went to the Flower Show in Boston to see Woody’s exhibit and cheer him on to great sales. Those have mostly been absent. He tries to sell 400 dollar plus planters and basins, wedged in between 10 dollar Christmas ornaments, an all purpose gardening tool and tubes of udder balm sold as miracle hand cream by a woman and her, now free from eczema, boy. You get a squirt if you want one. While massaging it into our hands we discovered the saleslady is also a nurse at UMass Memorial Hospital in Worcester, which led to a long conversation.

We wandered through the main horticultural displays where Axel’s father used to show his talents and wares some 30 years ago. The experience of walking on concrete for several hours reminded us of our ill-advised trip to IKEA several months ago. We can still not do this very well and we arrived home limping (me) and Axel in great (back and hip) pain. We cooked ourselves a light dinner and ate it in front of the TV. It seemed fitting to watch Moore’s documentary about the US health care system (Sicko) to forget our pains by immersing ourselves into the bad (health) luck of others. The operative phrase is ‘so you think you are covered?’  I learned about all this in my early years in the US when I delved into the world of insurance and discovered nothing but scams.  We made it about halfway through the movie when we called it a day and got our tired and sore bodies into bed.

I woke up to grey skies and rain. Axel woke up to a terrible pain in his back which required emergency massage. I settled him among pillows with a hot pad and made breakfast. It seemed like a good day for breakfast in bed; no appointments, no need to be anywhere for anyone except ourselves. While Axel’s back was calming down under the heatpad I made French toast from Italian bread, the kind that ends up like custard in between crusts of cinnamon toast. While we were eating the rain turned into snow and everything is turning white. Now there really is no point in getting up. I reserved a plane for 12:30 but I think I will let it go. There is more tea to drink, a newspaper to read and a book to finish.

Yesterday was another intense and long workday, and the juggling continues. A somewhat edgy three-party phone call with partners who we also compete with at times ended up producing strong feelings that drain people but also spur them into action; more or different than expected. This is why rational planning often underestimates time – we simply leave out such scenarios, and yet they happen all the time. I ended up spending half the day on something for which I had budgeted only an hour or so.

It was good that the St. Johns called in the middle of the afternoon to tell us that they were going into Cambridge to a comedy show; would we want to join them. Such prods from outside are good and put an end to the possibility of contemplating work beyond five o’clock. We bought the tickets, drove into town, had a bowl of Chinese noodles and sat down in the tiny third-floor comedy club, and laughed, which is what we paid for. I had not realized there were so many styles of stand-up comedy. I could not understand everything, sometimes because of accents and language and sometimes because I am a little dense or could not imagine that jokes could be made about such things. For example I did not get the KKK jokes from the black comedian and this was, how embarrassing, publicly acknowledged. Katy-Blair offered my Dutchness as an excuse which then led to more jokes. It was a tiny place and I was sitting at 2 feet from the host so every facial expression is picked up and potential material for more jokes. At least I was not asked to get on stage, that would be have been the ultimate embarrassment.

Back home we tumbled into bed, tired from the long day. And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, I relived the last few seconds before the crash; the plane veering off to the right and out of control, the trees rushing up to meet us and the sense that this was it, game over!

It took awhile to shed the image and let it go, partially because I wanted to understand why it suddenly appeared. It is true that on the 14^th of the month the crash does tend to come back to the center of my attention, depite the work and other distractions. Also, Axel and I talked about his EMDR sessions with Ruth. They don’t talk all that much about the crash but yesterday they did.

What was left after the crash image disappeared was the realization, and surprise, that I think nothing of getting on a plane again.