Sylvia's Journal

This morning, as I drove down an empty stretch of 128 in the early morning sunlight I pondered how peace(fullness) and health are two things that we take for granted when we have so much of it. And then, when they are gone, we wake up to their shocking importance.

I tried to imagine that same stretch of 128 pockmarked from exploded shells, with blast walls along the sides, obscuring the blossoming trees, and covered with razor wire; men with guns at road blocks ahead.

It is not too hard to create this vista after having lived in the Middle East and Afghanistan. I imagined myself driving in this scene with a heavy heart, thinking about all the good times that I took for granted and leaving me full of regrets. Regrets of not enjoying beauty, health and peace more, being distracted by unimportant things, wishes and wants that have nothing to do with beauty, health and peace.

This is of course a reality for people all over the world, for older people who have known times before things started to fall apart, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and Iran.

I drove the rest of my commute to Cambridge trying to fill my heart and lungs with all these things I take for granted.

We are eating asparagus every other evening. They are now popping up like crazy in our garden. It is hard to keep up. We prepare them the Flemish way, always: a hardboiled egg, potatoes, ham, all drizzled with butter, and then a bottomless dish of asparagus. We are managing the asparagus beetles with a non-toxic calcium-like powder they prefer to eat over the asparagus, which subsequently kills them. It seems to work as the spears have straightened up and we can keep picking and eating.

Last night was candidates’ night at the Legion in Manchester for next week’s town government elections. We came a little too late to mingle informally with the candidates, three for two empy selectmen slots. The meeting started with all of us turning to the flag and pledging our allegiance. I still find that awkward, especially putting my right hand on my heart, but I did, and then watched Axel’s mouth for the words. I can nearly do this on my own now.

The process of getting to know the candidates was highly choreographed, with three citizens (a student, a soccer mom and a retired person) asking questions to the three candidates for a specific number of minutes after which the iPhone chimed. After that we, unscripted people, got to ask questions. I asked how they bring people together over contentious topics, like budgets, schools and dogs on the beach. One candidate said it wasn’t rocket science, but I think it is more complex than rocket science, handling strong and brittle egos when taxes and real estate values are at stake.

The candidates were showing their best sides and hardly differentiated themselves from each other. Other criteria will have to be considered such as do I vote a woman because she is a woman, a smart woman at that? Do I go for the newcomers (both of them men)? Do I go for commitment? And what counts as commitment? And what about this ‘rocket science’ statement?
Having done my civic duty I tumbled into bed about the same time that 2nd graders turn in. I have to in order to get my 8 hours of sleep.

We met Alison and Mark at the Me and Thee coffeehouse in Marblehead to see Zoe and Mark play. It was my third Zoe (Lewis) concert and so I was familiar with many of the stories and songs that she intertwines into an extraordinary performance, with Mark adding a beautiful touch of clarinet to fill out the mood. Zoe and Mark’s concerts make me happy, which was happiness added to my sense of liberation.

On Sunday we had conspired with Tessa and Steve to surprise Sita on her first mother’s day. Sita thought I was in Egypt and Jim kept the secret. We showed up on that beautiful Sunday, after having driven through a major downpour, with a complete brunch and flowers and plants. We found Sita planting her medicinal garden to which we added a few more plants. It was a total surprise indeed.

We enjoyed our lunch sitting in the garden, much like I imagine French Sunday afternoon family lunches, joyful and noisy. Faro joined us after lunch, refreshed from a nap, showing off his red hair that is coming in fast.

We planted potatoes in the front and back garden, settled two rhododendrons and laid down on the grass with Faro and the dogs crawling all over us leaving Sita the space and time to garden without having to worry about anything. That’s the best mother’s day present.

And then the sense of liberation faded away as my empty schedule started filling up again.

I was supposed to have gotten on a plane tonight and travel to Egypt. I haven’t been in Egypt for 36 years and was excited to check out the new Egypt. But yesterday I received a message that this was not to be. The trip was postponed by two weeks and the new dates don’t work for me. Alas. This is the second aborted attempt to return to Egypt. On January 29 (?) 2011 I had my visa in hand and was ready to visit Egypt with 16 Afghans. But things took a turn on Tahrir Square and our trip was postponed, then cancelled.

On the upside, I suddenly have an ocean of unprogrammed time ahead of me. It was a very liberating feeling – I haven’t been unprogrammed for months. Axel commented that I have been wound up tight as a top. Indeed, I have been, sliding from one intense assignment to another, getting up at 4:30 in the morning and often working in the evening before collapsing at 9 PM.

One of the things I have been working on early mornings or after dinner are the requirements for my coaching certification that command about 5 hours a week, most outside work hours: practice coaching sessions with people in my cohort, being on the giving and receiving end has taken 2 to 3 hours a week; weekly support group sessions on Sunday evening and a weekly class by phone eat up another two and a half hours. Most of these requirements, at least for the first phase of my training, have been met. By Monday I will have completed all but the Wednesday evening classes and monthly mentoring sessions, which will go on, seemingly ad infinitum, but in reality till October. Another 30 hour training weekend is beginning to appear on the horizon, the day after faro’s first birthday next month.

Our peer group calls always start with a check-in, with the innocent question of ‘how was your week?’ None of us has a straight answer. It’s always an ‘up-and-down’ answer. As I reflect on this week, during which I did not add one single post, and from my new liberated vantage point, I realize that this week as been, once more an emotional rollercoaster.

Two weeks ago I had been requested to investigate a drawn out organizational process that had left much pain in its wake, and prepare a meeting with key stakeholders with the purpose of learning. The closing meeting was on Monday and created more turbulences in spite of an overall outcome that was very positive. How can that happen? Answering that has taken much of my mental energy this week.

I learned a few things about myself in the process and try to be more self aware, putting my coaching learnings into practice and noticing the results. The investment is paying off. As my teachers say, coaching is about being rather than doing, although I am also aware of how much doing has to precede the being.

And so I am reveling in my sense of freedom. I took the day off since it was programmed for packing and leaving. I scheduled a massage, caught up on (a fraction of) old new Yorkers, try to keep up with sister’s astonishing scrabble skills, and bought tickets to a concert of Zoe Lewis tonight in Marblehead. The disappointment of the cancellation of the Egypt trip has faded and is replaced by the joy of a wide open space. And while I enjoy all of that Axel has a crown put in this afternoon and has to open wide.

A radio announcement for motorized shades that you can control from your mobile device – who’d think we’d need such a device? Of course we need it, while we are away from home we can open and close our shades. Everything instantly, when we want it, where we want it. We live in a world of privilege and speed, both sold to us as entitlements and ease.

It was exactly the same thought I had yesterday evening at the house of friends. I sat by the fire, with a glass of not so cheap wine in my hand and was able to ‘be here now.’ Such privilege, I mantra-ed, look at me, warm, full belly and dry, and then on top of that so much more. I was bursting with gratitude.

But such moments are rare. I don’t often think about privilege or being entirely contented. As I drive to work in the morning I pass countless billboards that encourage me to not be content, to want more, buy more, and occasionally give more.

The barrage of messages must be contributing to my restlessness. I did an experiment and tried not to read these messages but I failed. Things to be read are in my face all day long: on my computer screen, on the billboards, on the front page of the newspaper I pick up when I leave the house and arrive at work, in the books, articles and journals that are strewn across my life.

The pace of life is ratcheting up, for me and most everyone around me. It seems to be unstoppable, up and up and no obvious way to bring it down. And as we adjust our lives we make more space for upping the pace, faster, quicker, and supposedly easier, like closing our living room shades from our car when the sun may damage our upholstered furniture. We are seduced by ease but what we get is ever more unease and disease. We have been talking a lot about sleeplessness lately, that’s what we get. Not able to come down.

I am wondering how to stay centered and mindful; my daily 15 minutes of meditation, are they enough? If I go to 20 or even 30 minutes I will have to get up even earlier than 4:30 AM which means I have to go to bed even earlier than 8:30 PM. I will end up going to bed when my grandson goes to bed, ha!

I am investigating an organizational mess and what I find stands in front of me like a mirror: stressed out people react rather than respond and the more stressed they are the more stress they provoke in others.

I am learning more about myself in this process than about others and mindfulness comes out as a huge challenge, mindfulness, center, and now.
I think I am going to plant some potatoes, mindfully, centered and now.

Today is the Queen’s Birthday, Koninginnedag, again. I think I wrote about this before. It is not really Queen Beatrix birthday but her mother’s. Beatrix was born on a cold winter day, not a good day to go out on the streets and celebrate. So the government made April 30 the forever Queen’s birthday.

But today is different because Queen Beatrix vacated the throne in favor of her first born, King Willem Alexander. His name makes one think of Russia and England, two nations once intertwined because of royal and imperial blood relations. I can’t remember the Dutch role in all this, but here he is, our new King. Axel was the first to tell me this morning. I am still a happy carrier of a Dutch passport, so I have a king now. Amazing, after three generations of Queens.

Our new king is married to an Argentinian. His mom, his aunt Irene and his grandma also looked for mates outside our borders. In the olden days of kings and queens and emperors, this made sense because such unions created or tightened strategic alliances. I don’t think these things matter much now. I presume she will be our new queen (not Queen).

A glorious weekend; if last week there were days that felt like November, this weekend was more like June. The birds are everywhere, trees are in bloom, tulips and daffodils are out. I biked to Quaker meeting where the messages were about peace, the following of an inner voice and the creativity and openness to the world of young children. I biked back full of energy and open to the world, noticing at least 50 cents worth of beer cans along the road. I used to stop and pick them up, but today I was in a hurry to get back to Lobster Cove.

Axel had gotten up early to see if the mussels we transplanted last summer had made it through the winter and the many storms that badgered Lobster Cove. The tide was so low that he could walk to the mouth of the cove – we can’t remember it being this low. He was happy to report most clumps were still where he’d put them and Roger brought a few more clumps from Ipswich – they are taking well to our waters.

He discovered a few oysters that had settled on a pipe that once wounded Sietske’s belly when she swam over it at low (but not low enough) tide. Our friend Jan, with snorkel on, sawed the pipe down. Now it is an oyster farm. But having oysters in Lobster Cove is not necessarily a good thing. We like them but they shouldn’t be here. They like warmer water than mussels.

I replaced the dead blueberry bush with a new one, full of blossoms. Now the surviving blueberry has a mate again and cross pollination can take place. I covered the raspberry and asparagus beds with shredded hay to keep the weeds down. Axel leveled the garden and covered it with black plastic to sanitize the soil. One more nice day like today will do the trick. Then we can put in the kale, beets, fingerling potatoes, leeks and coriander.

I have gotten into the habit of drinking hot water in the morning, and even all day long. There have been days or even weeks when I didn’t touch coffee or tea. It’s good to know I can easily drop these addictives. I learned to drink hot water from a friend who hails from the Far East.

But this morning I decided I wanted some coffee and picked, from the array of cups for the Keurig machine the Dark Magic. It promised spellbinding complexity and a deep, dark and intense experience…as if I was in the Far East. Given the tasks I am working on it seemed a better choice than the Kenyan AA which promised only sparkling freshness. Despite its promises, the cup of coffee was a ‘meh’ experience, and so I went back to hot water.

Faro gets in hot water all the time, now that he is totally mobile. Our derobed living room has lengthened the time between interventions from one second to ten – when one of us has to get up and take something out of his hands that shouldn’t be there, or drag him back from wherever he is going. He is liquid, like water, or maybe mercury, moving fast over surfaces, easily moving over obstacles now. It’s nice to be a grandparent. I can feel useful (to the exhausted parents) and also withdraw without asking permission when I have enough of this policing.

With Sita, Faro and Jim camping out at our house a lot (because of Sita’s gigs in Boston), Axel has been our designated chief cook and bottle washer. He is getting better at remembering to have a meal ready when I come home, exhausted from 12 hours away from home, filled with office work that is at times creative or dramatic. He made nearly all the recipes from a Weight Watcher’s power foods cookbook, a daily treat with few points. He got it at his weekly weigh-in, where he competes with Gloucester women on how to get the most weight off. He has been doing well, with a few lapses. These lapses come from watching MadMen. The series stimulate the consumption of (strong) alcoholic beverages. We are now in season 4, and that habit is still strong. The formula is: Make sure you always have a bottle of something strong at hand. When there is trouble, a difficult moment or conversation, pour a tumbler, empty it in one gulp, then sigh! At least we are resisting the lighting up. I know from my past (smoking) life that watching such actions make you want to do the same – it is highly contagious.

I am making some progress in my coaching training. The end of the sessions with members of my cohort (3 one hour sessions a week for 12 weeks in a row) is in sight. By the time I depart for Egypt, in two weeks, some of these weekly requirements should be completed, lightening my weekly schedule a bit.

While many things were out of order the last week, something was very orderly: the first 6 asparagus spears are poking through the soil, the lilacs are budding, the forsythia bush is in full bloom and the trees along the Charles River are full of blossoms. The daffodils that some kind souls or the town planted along the Charles make the walk along Memorial Drive particularly attractive. I remember last year walking that path, taking pictures and marveling at the beauty. I am sad that this year I can’t make that walk anymore – most any walk is now out of the question.

We worked in the yard; burning the winter debris in the garden, pruning the fruit trees and bushes and raking the leaves, exposing the white pips of the lily of the value, poking through the undergrowth. We know the sequence so well, seeing one after the other part of our garden come to life. The blisters on my hands after an hour of raking are also a recurrent phenomenon each spring.

All these new beginnings tried to offset the endings – two funerals took place of people killed in the mayhem last week – but the sadness if everywhere. Testimonials to the young MIT police officer are on buildings, lighted homages he will never read. And then there is the 8 year old boy who was buried today. I can’t begin to imagine the hole he leaves behind.

Sita, Jim and Faro are back with us, transforming our living room into something we vaguely remember from 30 years ago – child proofed, all the tchotchkies removed, empty surfaces; the results of our Brazilian cleaning lady’s efforts obscured before I even came home. It will pass, I think, although I also know this passing will take a while. But we are richly compensated by Faro’s grins and chuckles – he likes being at opa’s and oma’s. He tried his first Marmite sandwich (he liked it) and had a sip of my beer (he also liked it but his mom did not like it that he liked it). He was less enthused about the edamame and broccoli – we found all smooched under his seat , spit out while we were not looking. He preferred the brown rice with Hoisin sauce and left a trail of grains along his feeding trail.

I have been singing Dutch songs with him. He recognizes them now; the one about hand clapping (in Dutch) leads to spontaneous handclapping and the one about how Lords, Ladies and Lads are riding their horses (‘Zo rijden de Heren…”) produces squeals of laughter but only for the Lads part which is the wild ride of course – he doesn’t care about the measured ride of the Lords or Ladies. And then, when he gets cranky and it is time for bed, I hand him back to his parents. Grantparenthood is the best!

By Thursday the more than full work week had started to interfere with my brain. After another long and intense meeting in the morning I had started to be forgetful, misplacing things. My body told me to go to sleep, and if that wasn’t possible, to go home. I did the latter, hoping for a quiet day on Friday, with only a few work-related things to attend to and the rest for rest.

But Friday turned out a little different. While I was in a deep and exhausted state of sleep, things started to unfold in Boston that were eerily reminiscent of Kabul. A 6 AM email from our office manager said ‘office closed, check the news.’ What I saw was beyond anything I’d ever expected to see in Boston – gunfire exchanges, captured on someone’s cellphone. Throughout the sequence I was struck by the barking dogs; animals know when something is amiss. There was mayhem in the animal kingdom and human kingdom alike.

Some of the action was very close to our office and many colleagues were in lockdown. They tweeted and facebooked to let people know they were OK. For people watching from a distance, these social media are a great thing and permitted full audience participation in the unfolding drama. News is no longer news but a series of personal experiences and opinions, especially when factual information is scarce.

We went through the day listening to the radio and watching TV until we couldn’t stomach anymore the guessing games, the rumors and the interviews with classmates who told us the two suspects were smart, wonderful and friendly (‘even aggressively friendly,’ said one – was that a clue?), while we were shown their pictures. Once the older one was dead the 19 year old suddenly looked very vulnerable and wide-eyed in a way I associate with innocence. Of course we knew he wasn’t but I couldn’t help thinking that something had gone terribly wrong in his brain.

I am wondering how he can recover in a hospital where he is kept from people, if even there would be any, who’d want to wish him well, with all the anger of the world directed at him. I am wondering about a thousand other things that will forever be different in the lives of those directly and indirectly affected. We are now in a new normal someone said on the radio. They also said that after 9/11 and they will say it every time something cataclysmic happens here.

And yet such events happen every day somewhere in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Somalia, in the Congo – no longer considered cataclysmic because they are part of the old normal over there. Nothing changes. But here things will change. I expect even more paranoia and efforts that feed into the illusion that, in today’s world, we can be safe. We cannot, no one ever has. It is the price we pay for living.