Sylvia's Journal

It’s travel time again. I am on my way to two rather exotic sounded places, les cotes d’epices (Zanzibar) and les cotes d’ivoire; one week here and one week there with a cross continental voyage in between. I am going with my brand new orange business card that shows my association with Johns Hopkins’ new communication project on which we are a core partner.

I am flying with my orthopedic boot which gives me support by immobilizing my ankle, and also a business class seat so I can keep my ankle elevated and walk around, both to avoid DVT.

I was able to pretty much clear my desk, a faint vision some weeks ago. Holding the boundaries between work and non work, between mere stress and outright panic has been the focus of my peer coaching conversations. Although these required coaching sessions were themselves a source of stress.

The plane is ready, have to stop now.

When Sita has business in Boston, we get to do business with our grandson. An early morning commute from Manchester to Boston beats one from Easthampton. We don’t mind, even if I only get to hear Faro when I get up early to go to work. I also get home early – now with Daylight Savings Time it stays light longer – and I get to give him his dinner. It was red/orange today: roasted beets, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, turnips and carrots; a nice wintery mush that went in fast.

He has two front teeth that would make the Velveteen Rabbit jealous. I gave him a celery stick which he crunched and crunched, without knowing quite what to make of it. Coming from a musical home, it took a longtime before he put the celery stick in his mouth – he has already learned that sticks are for drumming, not for eating.

Yesterday I had my stitches taken out. The doctor showed us the scope pictures which confirmed that the tibia/talus joint is in bad repair – pink color being bad, bone on bone. It explained the painful walking. We explored next steps if this doesn’t do the trick – too early to tell. Ankle resurfacing (or reconstruction) is, compared to knee and hip technology, lagging behind and the top orthopede at Mass General would not recommend it. The case load is not quite big enough to create deep and wide expertise in this complicated procedure. So for now, we cross our fingers.

The coaching program I started a month ago is picking up in the amount of time I have to dedicate to it. Every week I have two hours of peer coaching, one as the coach and one as the coachee. And then there is a a peer group teleconference, with five other women who participated in our workshop last month. In a few weeks the program adds to that a weekly mass teleconference (of 90 minutes) plus a half hour with my own mentor.  All this should be completed by June when I take the second workshop over a 30 hour weekend. It is all very challenging and the more I learn the less I realize that I know. Coaching comes with incredible promises of more happiness, more income, more customers, and the stories abound, but I can’t quite believe that I could ever pull this off. I have to keep reminding myself that practice makes perfect.

I am immersing myself in the social innovation/innovation world with the coursera course I take which is based on the book “Creative people must be stopped,” by David Owens from Vanderbilt University. Fascinating. I can’t help but think that the new attention to innovation at my work may shake something loose that has been stuck and rusty for a long time.

While Axel is cooking the salmon and the roasted vegetables I am listening to Pat Boone and other singers that connect us instantly to teenage (or earlier) memories. The fundraiser for WGBH is clearly aimed at baby boomers. Of course our memories are very different; Axel has American teenage memories while I have Dutch early teen memories that do not include boyfriends and are fitted in a context that has nothing to do with the lyrics.

Que Sera Sera instantly took me back to my childhood home and my (Irish twin) brother. I remember singing the song at the top of our lungs, without any idea what either the English or the Que Sera meant – for us both languages were foreign – but the words were easily sung, maybe even in the bathtub.  Although the memory is probably a bit distorted, it is connected to another memory, which has us clad in our ‘Sing-Sing’ shirts. We had, once again, no idea what Sing-Sing meant, just the name of these striped shirts, mine red and white and my brother’s blue and white. What did we know about prisons in America, this mystical land so very far away.

I am not up and about with my orthopedic boot. I have taken the bandages off, against my discharge instructions, but I couldn’t stand the tight wrap any longer. I ice the ankle frequently but have abandoned the crutches which are standing lonely against a wall. I picked them up at a recycling place, after having discovered that we had given our crutches away. An appeal on FreeCycle brought 10 responses. Now we can re-cycle them again.

The last few days I was racing against the time, completing assignments that have a due date before I leave, a week from now and responding to new assignments that keep showing up in my inbox.

Axel went out snow shoeing – oh how I wished I could have come along – in the pristine Audubon reserve in Topsfield. Tessa and dogs reported on beaches having practically swept away by hurricane strength winter storms, one after the other. After a 48 hour snowstorm we escaped the house last night for a dinner with Steve and Tessa – cabin fever was beginning to get at me. I had been sitting in the same place, leg up, ice machine on, for 72 hours, working like crazy.

I am hobbling again, sometimes with two crutches, more and more with one and occasionally with none. Surgery was yesterday and went well. I arrived home about 6 hours after arriving at the hospital, 90 minutes of which I was in the OR.

I was greeted at home by MaryAnne’s lemon custard, a hefty tome about Joseph Kennedy, presumably to lighten my spirits, and a pot with blue hyacinths that created instant allergic attacks for Axel and Tessa. Axel had picked up the pain pills in the meantime and Tessa cooked my favorite Dutch meal, boerenkool met worst from their Polish neighborhood Deli.

Tessa and Steve moved most of their furniture to their new apartment but they are still with us as the building had not yet received its occupancy permit. There is still much missing, such as the parking garage and mail boxes, and the varnish on the hardwood floor had not hardened yet, leaving it all scratchy. Not a good entry to their new address. They are lucky in that they still have a place to stay with us. And we get to keep them a bit longer.

I realize that I am now down to one post a week. Time for quiet reflection has been at a premium. Ahead of the blog are my daily meditations, my yoga practice, infrequent as it is, and the long to do list. Yet, in spite of a long and stressful week, today in Quaker Meeting I felt energized, connected and in tune with something bigger than myself.

When the hour was over I discovered that I had been oblivious to all the people who had entered after I sat down. One of them was Sita’s classmate whose school we visited in Sikkim a few years ago. He was over for a brief visit. With a Buddhist father he knows about intentions and prayers and asked our community to hold his kids in Sikkim in the light, after I had asked for light on my ankle, on Tuesday especially. After Meeting a Feldenkrais practitioner among us set to work immediately with this light and gave my ankle a 10 minute treatment. It felt good until I went to the supermarket for milk and eggs; still, it gave me confidence to take the dogs to the beach while Tessa, Axel and Steve took a Uhaul with all their stuff to Dorchester.

During our Meeting for worship a message bubbling up in our midst was about a Bible passage where one translation from the ancient biblical language had used the word ‘perfect’ while another translation used the word ‘whole.’ The latter resonated more with me, reminding me of a dream I had earlier this week. The dream was about keeping your eye on the prize and jumping, then falling, but staying whole in spite of the fall and trying again. Trying is much easier when you’re whole than when you’re broken.

Contributing to both my stress levels and my sense of wholeness is the coaching program in which I’m enrolled. By the end of February 5 long reflective pieces were due. I am glad I started working on those back in December, as these were not assignments you could complete the day before the due date. Having shipped those off, in time, was a big relief. It keeps me in the running for eventual certification by the International Coaching Federation.

There are many requirements for this program. They include weekly hour-long conversations with a peer group, weekly practice coaching sessions on each other, both as coachee and coach, work with a mentor, 25 hour-long tele-classes, two more 30 hour workshops and complementary sessions of one hour before a final exam, later this fall. Altogether this adds up to many hours a week, but it is worth my while, including the hours I spend on this during the weekend. To my great surprise the coaching training I’m getting now seems to be a piece of the puzzle that had been missing. There is that wholeness thing again. As an avid puzzler I understand about these last pieces that fill a hole and make whole.

The phantom storm was no phantom storm further east. On our way home from Sita and Jim we passed through Worcester which had fresh snow on the ground and the trees. It got even heavier further east.

Back home the storm was in full swing. Axel scraped my car clean, turned it around ready for going to work on Monday morning for an all-day retreat with our learning organization team on how to turn MSH into a learning organization. We had gotten some expert advice from a local consulting firm that has much experience working with organizations like us that are trying to tackle ‘wicked’ problems.

“A wicked problem has no definite formulation of the problem, no clear solutions or end points, no immediate or ultimate test of the solution and problems are intertwined in such a way that any given problem, and its interactions with others, will open doors and windows to still other problems.” (From Michael Quinn Patton, Developmental Evaluation, 2011:253). So there you have it. This is my work.

I decided to work from home the rest of the week to bite through a whole slew of assignments that are all coming close to their deadlines. On Tuesday I made some headway but today I had one telephone call after another, and other unexpected stuff landed on my plate requiring immediate action. I did not get a whole lot closer to my goal today and am exhausted from the efforts to keep my head above the water. No more complaints about not enough work – I am nearly drowning.

I have one more day of work at home to make a dent in the pile that is staring me in the face: leadership strategy setting, a one-day event in DC on Friday where I am supposed to present something meaningful on slides; a trip to Zanzibar, continuous multiple doctors’ visits, coaching, training of trainers of basic wheelchair services, a large global meeting in Uganda and another, as large, in DC 6 weeks away. Plus a few requests that have to do with being auditable, paper trails and such.

In some ways, my daily life is the victory of what the women’s movement worked towards – professional and personal fulfillment, as a worker, wife, mother and grandmother. Last night Axel, Tessa and I watched an extraordinary documentary about the women’s movement, from way back, through its heyday in the 60s and 70s, its downfall during Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly (my Planned Parenthood years). Tessa’s enthusiastic post on facebook made me think that it may have planted a seed that will take the women’s movement out of its hibernation, just waiting for new Glorias and Betties to emerge.

After several trips were planned and then canceled suddenly everything begins to happen at once. My ankle surgery on March 5 turns out to be only 11 days before my first assignment with the new Johns Hopkins project on which we are partner. I left a message with the orthopedic surgeon to find out whether I can even consider traveling. If he OKs it, I will be off to Zanzibar first and then a side trip to Ivory Coast.

I had my pre-op admissions testing today, some tests, and was considered fit for surgery. It got me home early which left me time to do an end-of-day yoga routine, and cook a thick and spicy peanut soup plus read half of Harvard Business Review.

I continue to have conversations with wheelchair experts all over the world. Putting together a training package is my assignment. Yesterday I had a conversation with Nancy who lives in a Somali refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. It is quite amazing that one can have a phone conversation, over Skype, with somebody in this faraway, and often forgotten, corner of the world. Nancy has been training wheelchair providers for many years now and gave me some good ideas on what new trainers have to be able to know and do.

It is very inspiring to see how the wheelchair provider community that stretches from the US to South Africa to Australia, to Japan, Hong Kong and Georgia, has come together to set standards and expand the number of trained service providers. The demand is huge and the work is demanding. Many people I am meeting are volunteers or work with small budgets.

During my commute home I listened to a reporter from Kabul giving an update on the heroic efforts of brave women who are trying, against a thousand odds, to get some legal teeth into the protection of women against their violent society. It is a long battle with women having to water down their demands in exchange for something, which is better than nothing. It was painful to hear the demands of the men they are negotiating with. The things we take for granted.

At home a few raw vegetables were laid out on a cutting board, suggesting I prepare dinner, no husband in sight. I was tired and hungry and cold, after a 10 hour workday full of overlapping meetings and a slow commute home. I felt so very sorry for myself, declined to cut the vegetables (swallowed the giant carrot whole) and angrily emptied a plastic container with leftovers in the microwave, so there!

But then I read an article about the nearly broke fishermen of Gloucester, being flattened by government regulations. I thought about the Afghan women and their battles, the family of an ex-colleague who died unexpectedly and too young, and another ex-colleague who seems to be bearing a cross that gets heavier by the day.

I sputtered a little when Axel came home but managed to abandon my self pity after counting all my blessings, being spared all these intractable entanglements and great griefs. I ended up having another dinner which was even better than the first, all in good harmony.

I am sitting on the couch with two Karl Weick books next to me. One is called sensemaking in organizations and the other is about managing the unexpected. All Weick’s work is about sensemaking. I pulled them off my book shelf because of a sensemaking experience that I had when listening to the second of the two concerts with the Afghan kids at the New England Conservatory.

One of the pieces on the program was a raga with an American tabla player and a white-haired Indian ustaad (I presumed) who played the sarod.  Somewhat reminiscent of a band I listened to several months ago, I couldn’t figure out when the tuning was done and the music had started. My western frame about music’s beginning and endings, about hand and head movements left me totally senseless.

The American tabla player seemed to be preparing to play, rubbing his hands on his pants, putting a powdery substance on the center of his two drums but then he would lean back and shook his head as if in disapproval of what his colleague on the carpet was doing. Sometimes he seemed to be uttering words which also seemed full of disapproval.  I was utterly lost in trying to make sense because none of my western sense making had prepared me for this. What was going on? Had the raga started, was the ustaad still tuning and the tabla player indicating that the sarod was not tuned? Or was this normal for a raga played with tabla and sarod?

I don’t have such experiences very often and if I do it is usually not in the US. I might have concluded that few situations throw me off these days – me the world traveler. But maybe it means that I am spending too much time on familiar territory.  I haven’t travelled in 2 months.

We did make a small trip on this holiday afternoon (Presidents Day) to Dorchester Avenue to see Tessa and Steve’s new apartment. It is indeed brand new, the appliances still packed in blue plastic sheets, shiny polyurethane floors, freshly painted and water views from two sides through brand new double glazed windows.

Move in day is about 2 weeks from now. We checked out the neighborhood and found a Polish deli within a stone’s throw. It was packed with hundreds of pickle jars, jams and jellies, sausages of any imaginable kind, a large variety of frozen pirogis and blintzes, mushrooms and cards with images of a suffering Christ.

On the suggestion of the real estate broker who rented the apartments, a local gentleman, we ordered one sandwich which fed the four of us, one foot long and not very vegetarian. We bought our dinner there (also not very vegetarian): sauerkraut with smoked bacon and kielbasa and some Polish beers with a name we cannot pronounce. I cooked it all using my grandmother’s cookbook from the early 1900s. I added some spices (juniper, black pepper) that weren’t suggested at that time. It was to die for.