A link

This is one of the most lovely NPR stories I've heard in a long time. Click here to enjoy

Braided

Airplanes are amazing portals, and I’m trying to make sense of their power. On the one hand, the trip from Wellington to Washington is a slog. 26 hours of airports and airplanes, turbulence, bad food, aching back, hours standing in line or smashed into too-small seats. On the other hand, it is a full-on miracle that I can just shuffle from place to place, walking from terminal to gate or sitting in a chair, and at the end of a relatively tiny amount of time find myself across an ocean and a continent, in another hemisphere, with access to a whole other life and whole other sets of relationships and work. And really, now that I’m 23 hours into this journey, I realise that it’s like a decompression chamber, the space that regulates the transition from one world to the next. It takes me at least this long to prepare to be in the US, to prepare to be back in NZ. I require this nowhere zone in order to make sense of the somewheres I’ve been.

I have made this journey back and forth across the Pacific again and again, perhaps 10 times in the last 5 years. And so the travel does not surprise me at all (although I’ll admit this one business class leg is pretty spectacular!). The beauty of the southwest US, the endless stretch of Pacific, the tears in my eyes with the first sight of either country, because both of them contain pieces of my heart—all of these are familiar to me. And on this trip I wasn’t going anywhere new or doing anything new and so I didn’t expect that the portal from one world to another would also rearrange my thinking in some new way. Why is it that my thinking would get more rearranged in 10 days in North America than it does in 10 days in New Zealand? I’m not sure. But here, on the plane ride home, I’m filled with the ways I am different and that I think my future may be different from doing the same sorts of things I have always done with people I’ve known and worked with for years.

The most nameable reason for this is the confluence of a variety of different forces which lead to my work being more integrated at the close of this trip than it has ever been before. For the last 15 or more years, I have struggled with the connections between the various parts of my life: the part of me that is a writer, the part that is a researcher, the part that is an organisational consultant, the part that thinks about teaching and learning in schools. Each of those parts has a little space in my life, but they have not lived together in those spaces, have not crossed from one stream to the next except in rare and lovely circumstances.

Suddenly all the pieces braid. It’s hard for me to even hold the way the parts have snaked together, disparate elements with almost nothing in common, held only in place through their connection to me somehow. I have never imagined such integration in my work and don’t even know quite what to do with it. Here, when my life is as dis-integrated as possible, when I feel the breadth and depth of the mighty pacific, the plains and mountains and deserts of this whole broad continent, here they have woven into a clear image, a braid, a integrated whole. My work in educational research at NZCER has expanded into organisational learning and transformational professional development for teachers. My work as an organisational consultant has expanded to be about long term transformational learning. My work as a writer is going to contain the lessons I’m learning in these other spaces. In every context, I will learn things that are useful for the other contexts. In every set of colleagues, I’ll be able to connect things said by another set of colleagues so that we can each hold on to the wisdom of each group, so that all of the people I think with will benefit from the others. My Kenning partners will, through me, add value to my NZCER work. The work I’m doing for clients with Keith will feed into Kenning, and all of it will find its way into a blog or book chapter somewhere. I have this strong eureka feeling about the whole thing, have this desire to talk to people about it until my throat is horse, to bow down at an altar, to offer orchids up to the gods.

Inside all of this delight about this lovely new integration, I have questions which surprise me. Who am I if it’s all integrated? The tornness of my work has been such a key feature in who I am that I hardly recognise my own emotions. And this from someone who has stopped using familiar spelling of words. Did I have to be so physically dis-integrated in order to become more integrated? While my work is integrated so that these different groups can learn and grow from one another, it’s still just me in the middle. I’m the only one who connects across these different spaces; I’m the only one who has conversations with these different people. This means that I find myself somehow at the centre of things rather than at the margins. Suddenly it’s important to folks at Kenning that I report back what I’m doing with Keith, important to the folks at NZCER that I write about the things I’m doing at Kenning. I’m so used to being the one in the background who kind of joins pieces pi n my own head; it’s strange ot be in the foreground and have to carry these pieces from place to place because of how valuable they are to the group. When you’ve set up house in the margins, suddenly the work at the centre becomes a little more public and, well, maybe more centred than feels comfortable.

So there’s no shortage of learning in this space for me, learning about the different strands in this braid, about the weight and heft of the braid itself, and about who I am in these new spaces. This wasn’t the work I was expecting to come out of these 10 days in North America, but this is what I’ve found here, amongst the cherry blossoms and the Harvard students. Now if I could only find the silver pin I lost here too….

PS Pictures today from my long weekend back in NZ. The first one is of Jeff, one of the two best bosses I've ever had, who is visiting for a few days on his sabbatical and showing my kids how to paint (more on this later I hope); sunset from my living room; the sea in front of our house.

Classy

What a funny travel day. Some number of hours ago I woke up at Jane’s house in Cambridge, ate yummy breakfast with her, and sat on her sofa and talked and talked. Then it was off to do a couple of errands, culminating with a trip to the Nerbury Street consignment shops I love so much (heaps of stores out of business on tony Newbury street, but the second hand stores seem to be feeling no pain). One pair of pants and a cushy purple cashmere sweater later (total= $40), we were off to the airport to get me there 2 hours ahead of my flight. But why oh why do we have to be there two hours early? Checked the bags, made it through security, bought lunch to eat on the plane and still I had 90 minutes to wait. So I watched the travellers and searched for a plug and tried to psyche myself up for work. And as I wandered around the full waiting area, I saw a very large woman in bright clothes with magenta hair, talking loudly on the phone and smacking her gum,. Perhaps even her size and sound would have escaped me until my eye lit on her forearm which was almost completely covered with a huge and hairy mole. Because I am not as good a person as I would like to be, I became aware of a wish that this woman would not be seated exactly next to me. I, who have often been the dreaded seat companion, baby in tow, knew this was unkind, and I tried to not think it, but the karma had been spent and, upon boarding, I found myself snuggled up next to the only person I had meant to avoid.

And snuggled we were, as she overtook her seat and came into mine. And there I wrestled with myself, feeling irritated because the loss of a couple of inches of my seat is actually a fairly large percentage given how tiny these seats are; feeling guilty because these are uncharitable thoughts and I am very lucky not to wrestle with my weight as she might and while my movement was restricted by the size of the seats and the size of my companion, she was wedged into the seat so tightly that she couldn’t even cross her legs. As she jiggled in her seat to the very loud music on her headphones, I tried to squash my tiny laptop in the only open space available and hope that the woman in front of me wouldn’t suddenly recline even more, further reducing the square inches available to me. And so I argued with myself in my mind over the course of the trip, my seatmate's arm pressed to mine, her leg hard up against my leg. I imagined how one might ask to be reseated under these circumstances. I watched the various ways I am not as nice a person as I’d like to be.

Finally, six-hour flight over, I had the merciful release of freedom of movement again in the wilds of the LAX airport. I dodged puddles walking from one terminal to the next in the drizzly fog (who ever heard of such weather in LA?) to get to the Air New Zealand terminal and the last step to home. There, I heard the most beautiful words, “Your upgrade has come through,” and I took from the hands of the angel behind the counter the business class ticket I had purchased with my many frequent flier miles.

This ticket is like crossing a portal into another world. My experience in the cattle class of the first flight, my body intimately pressed against the stranger next to me, my laptop screen dipped to a nearly-illegible angle, is a different world from this, my first foray into the world of the business class traveller. The pod from which I write, 10 hours into the flight, has walls on either side, keeping even my eyes from alighting on another passenger. I have woken from a 7.5 hour sleep which I mostly did on my stomach and side on these flat beds. This is as unlike air travel as anything I’ve ever experienced. The attendants trip over each other in the aisles, so eager are they to attend to our every need. I can watch any movie I like, keep my seat back reclined during take off and landing, and basically act like the queen of the world which, right this moment, I am.

Now I know that the ticket for this seat, should I have paid cash rather than frequent flier miles for it, is between five and ten TIMES the cost of the seats I have always ridden in before. And in some ways that makes sense as I’m taking up the room on this flight into which several very large women could squash themselves. And I feel ambivalent here too, thinking about the carbon miles that go into this luxurious ride, about the unequal and disturbing class distinctions that I am enacting—this time from the position of power. And I also know that the arguments I’m having with myself and my values in this seat are less passionate than the arguments I was having with myself and my values in the last seat. Why would I be less worried about my movement into the unfair upper class rather than my oppression by the size of my large neighbour? Mostly because I’ve been too busy eating lovely food, drinking fine Pinot Noir, and sleeping on my stomach for the last 10 hours. With so much to do, how can a girl fit in a push for social justice as well?

Finishing up

And now it's all behind me. I'm posting from LAX, about to board my plane to fly back back over the Pacific and back to the kids and the man and the dog and the beach and my friends and my job and and and.
But first, a picture or two from The Big Stage. The first two are pre-lecture, the last one is post-lecture. Now I just have to figure out what this whole thing means to me. Hmmm.

where in the world is jgb?

Working her tail off on a whole other side of the world. Two days in DC, 2 days in Montreal, now 4 days in Cambridge. There is so much to say that I'm speechless. Enjoy pictures from the only sunny day of the trip...