Sylvia's Journal

I am indulging, in DC, in a reflective exercise that is rare in our busy and action-oriented work. We are reflecting, face to face, in a small group of people who have worked on several senior leadership programs, the last one just completed a month ago in Addis. There is much to learn. We are learning amongst ourselves, which is both great and a pity, because some other critical partners are not at the table. Sometimes we want things that are simply not possible and so we learn in stages.

Learning usually happens around the edges of doing, but this time there is also some ‘doing’ around the learning edges, which means that I am working at night and also taking my meals with colleagues. So, sorry to my DC-based friends – there will be next times, and they are always better when Axel and I visit DC together.

Thinking I was traveling south it never occurred to me to check temperatures; and so I left without a scarf and a hat. That was a mistake. It was 24 degrees last night with a biting wind circling around the tall buildings. I went to nearby Macy’s to see if they would have some cheap scarves and hats on a post-holiday sale but they must have sold most of their stock. What was left was both hideous and overpriced and my Dutchness took the better of me. I rather suffered the cold than pay 35 dollars for an ugly hat to keep me warm.

The cold weather made me crave Italian food, and more specifically for pasta with wild mushrooms, a good glass of red wine, and, if at all possible a fire place. The latter I had to do without; restaurants with fireplaces are not very common here in the suburbs of DC. I did have the other two, the wild mushroom pasta and a nice glass of red wine in an otherwise empty restaurant – it must have been too cold for an evening out.

We have gotten several reminders that life is precious and not to be taken for granted. I saw a bumper sticker on a car that said: I’d rather be here now.  Yes please!

Our friend D is in the emergency room with a dissected aorta; S’s husband is recovering from a quintuple bypass – we didn’t even know such a thing was possible. The heart attack came while he was driving; and I skyped with M in Jordan who lost her 9 year old son to diabetes a few months ago. There is much grieving out there. Life is fragile.

Sita got sock wool for Christmas from her husband – implied in the gift was a desire for hand-knitted socks. This is a new frontier for Sita. Today we are going to get her the right size needles and I will help her. In order to remind myself how to knit sock I knitted a pair for myself. I used a ball of Kashmir wool that I had purchased many years ago in Kabul. The moths had gotten a hold of this and other wool brought back from Afghanistan. I had put the balls in the freezer for a few months and took the wool out for the socks. Every few yards the yarn had been eaten through but the pair was made in spite of it all.

I found my mother’s handwritten instructions for making socks during one of my decluttering attempts. When I grew up my mother knit all the socks for 5 kids, darning them in between kids with a wooden darning egg. She taught me knitting but the darning I never got right. Nowadays socks are so cheap it is hardly worth making them yourself, but it is fun and very satisfying to knit one’s own. She also knit us countless sweaters – all this while holding a job; as kids we took all this for granted.

On this last day of 2015 I intend to not take anything for granted and try as much as I can to be here now. Wishing my faithful followers a happy 2016.

It has been a week since I last wrote. In the meantime we have had christmas in Easthampton with our family, and then in Berlin (MA) with Jim’s family.  I am writing christmas with a lower case c because we didn’t sing any carols or went to church or talked about baby Jesus or peace on earth.  It was a family affair with gifts and Christerklaas poems and as such it was nice.  One of the nicest parts of this christmas was that I was able to spend a lot of time with Faro and Saffi.

On christmas day I sent everyone out for a walk while I prepared a rijsttafel with 9 dishes: gado-gado (parboiled or raw veggies with peanut sauce), atjar (pickled salad), nasi goring (fried rice), telor bumbu bali (spicy eggs), sambal goring buntjies (spicy string beans in coconut sauce), soybean cake fry, chicken in kemiri nut and coconut sauce, gulai kambing padang (lamb stew Sumatra style), krupuk (crispy chrimp chips) and beef sate with peanut sauce. It is a combination we tried out some years ago on Thanksgiving day and it works just as well on christmas, even for vegetarians. Faro thought the krupuk were potato chips but we let that pass as for him it was the highlight of the meal, that and the boiled eggs decorating the gado-gado.

With the Christerklaas requirements of poems and surprises behind us my vacation really started on Sunday with visits to new and old friends in their brand-new homes, and every night an Agatha Christie before bedtime and not having to do anything at any time, not even physical therapy.

We are going to bed later and later and I am sleeping in longer and longer. Was I still waking up, out of habit, at 5 AM last week, I can now easily sleep till 9 AM. I wander downstairs in my robe, have a cup of tea and stay in my pajamas until well after lunch time. And then we decide what we are going to do with the rest of the day. This includes some chores like painting or decluttering but more non chores like reading, knitting, going to the museum and dining out.

I think about my recently retired colleagues who are, more or less, in my age cohort. This is their new life. I wonder how quickly all this freedom would get old. For now, I am enjoying this temporary break in my heavy work schedule before I start to travel again, next Monday – first to Arlington (DC) and then to Thailand.

My body has given me ample signals to take it easy, and thus, today, starts a 10 day stretch of sleeping in and chilling. That is, after I have done my Christerklaas rhymes and wrappings. This year there is little sign of Christmas in our house: no tree, no wreaths, and no candles. We will celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Easthampton this year, so no need to decorate our home.

The only signs of Christmas are the Christmas cards that people sent us every year and Axel repeating his intentions about our Christmas cards for 2015. This is his job, as I have never quite understood the idea of Christmas cards, especially those with scenes of winter, red birds and Christmas trees, or those with Peace and Love messages. I do like the ones with family pictures, especially from those we don’t see very often or families that are expanding very fast and we are way behind, the last grandchild no longer being the last. Now that we have Facebook we don’t need these cards anymore as a means of ‘staying in touch.’

My job at Christmas is making mustard. It has been for the last few decades. It is a tradition that started with finding a book in the (West Newbury) library called ‘Better than Store Bought.’ I was intrigued by the mustard recipes and tried one, then another, etc. Over all these years the mustard has never come out bad, though I have simplified my operation. I now make only one or two types (tarragon/white wine and red wine/garlic and pepper). The labels, which I make without assistance from the graphic designers in my family, are also simplified and simply state that inside is Sylvia’s Christmas mustard.

But this year the red wine mustard came out bad. It tasted metallic. I threw several pounds of it out. I had already made the white wine mustard which came out nice, as it always does. I played the scientist, reviewing all the variables in a failed experiment. The ingredients in common with the white wine mustard could not be the culprits, which left the red wine vinegar (I threw out a whole gallon, prematurely). I started with better quality red wine vinegar, fresh garlic, freshly ground black pepper and a reasonable good wine and made a new batch. It still came out bad. I would never be a good scientist because I gave up.

I finished listening to Lisa Randall’s book about Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs and learned what real science is about. I understood about 20% of the book and expanded my time horizon to about 30 billion years which made me more patient with the present. I also appreciated that scientists never give up. But this mustard scientist is not cut from the same cloth.

And so this year’s mustard will be a ‘limited edition’ mustard. I have one last hypothesis, could it be the seeds? Are not all mustard seeds alike?  The seeds for the white wine mustard had a different source than the seeds I used in the two failed batches. Maybe I should start growing my own. Merry Christmas!

In a few hours I will have been home for a week. On Saturday and Sunday we made the rounds of our kids and grandkids, a 6 and a half hours spent in the car which left me stiff and grumpy. But the hours spent in between with them were the most happy.  Saffi laughed and interacted with me in ways she had not been able to do when I left. Faro’s linguistic abilities make it hard to imagine a time when he could not converse as he does now. He is a very physical little boy and bounces up and down the couches, making forts from the pillows, and disappearing underneath. There is no sitting still except for meals, but only for a very short time.

Tessa and Steve are now married officially and have a ring tattooed on their finger. This means Tessa is on Steve’s health insurance, a sigh of relief from all of us.  The cost of health care in the US, when not insured, could ruin an entire extended family. The real wedding, in their eyes, is on September 16 next year and preparations are underway. It will be a do-it-yourself wedding at their house, followed the next day by a big potluck celebration.

I went to work on Tuesday and Wednesday and learned about a few more departures. The area where my cubicle sits has become rather empty; a place for 16 people now occupied by one person full time and three of us now and then.

Somehow, between Tuesday and yesterday I developed a full-fledged head cold, reminding me of my sick days in Madagascar. Whatever immunity I may have developed there didn’t help me ward of the North American virus responsible for my miserable state. I was going to take some personal days but one turned into a partial workday and the other is now officially a sick day.

On October 30, after having watched the movie ‘’That Sugar Film’ on my way to Johannesburg, I resolved to not consume any (processed) sugar during my six week trip. This trip is now over and I succeeded.

I refused all baked goods that included sugar, including the brownies and cookies offered at workshop breaks, the breathtaking cakes and pastries displayed on hotel buffets, the ice cream offered halfway through the intercontinental flights, the gum, sweets and power bars which I would certainly have taken before, especially when hungry.

I spent 25 days in chocolate producing countries (Madagascar and Cote d’Ivoire) where I have bought chocolate in large quantities before. The only chocolate I bought (and ate all by myself) was a 5 Euro bar at the airport of Antananarivo which contained 100% cocoa. It took 10 days before it was gone. I did eat fresh fruit every morning, in small quantities, but avoided fruit juices.

My goal was to find out how a sugarless (including fake sugar) diet would affect me. And here is how: my mental clarity improved. I think more clearly now, even after a 6 week road trip, then I did at the beginning. I actually started off very sick, not sure it was related as it was a respiratory ailment in a polluted environment during their flu season, which makes cause and effect hard to establish. But after I recovered I felt better every day, and was in great shape when I landed at Logan, yesterday, after 6 weeks and a 30 hour trip.

I also lost 5 pounds. Usually I gain 5 pounds after each trip, which I usually lose quickly after I return. So I could, theoretically, have gained 20 pounds, given that I had 4 assignments in a row.

And best of all, I entirely lost my craving for sugar and have no difficulty ignoring any sugary thing put in front of me, even the things I could not resist 6 weeks ago. And so I think I continue this new habit over Christmas, the ultimate test.

I am finally home. It is the best part of travel, though it has been a great trip. I met some wonderful and dedicated people and am reminded again that there are more good people than bad people. After watching the repetitive news on Al Jazeera, BBC and France’s TV 24 in my various hotel rooms, this is a fact that is easy to overlook.

On the way home I read most of K. O Schmidt’s book “Le hasard n’existe pas,” and excellent French translation of the original German. The book was a gift from my colleague Rose in Abidjan.

Schmidt’s credo is: “En toi réside la cause de tout ce qui t’arrive dans la vie.” It matches quite nicely my proposition to participants in our workshops: all our troubles and challenges are created by ourselves – a practical proposition because it means you can change things. If others create these problems, and inflict them on us, then what can we possibly do to make things better? The current debates raging around the world, and which only benefit the military-industrial complex, shows the futility of taking this tack, dragging us ever deeper into arms races, serpentine wires and toxicity of all types.