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.