Thirty-five Falls Later

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

What's Different:

As I imagine my arrival at the Detroit Airport and then on the University of Michigan campus on Wednesday, I'm thinking of all that's different since Day One of my freshman year there, and am grateful, mostly:

1. I wrote an Honors thesis, "Women's Damned Desires: A Comparison of Four Twentieth-century American and Israeli Short Stories," and graduated with High Honors as a Comparative Literature major.
2. Both of my parents (z"l) are gone and my two sisters and I have families of our own.
3. I'm openly lesbian.
4. Friends of mine died of AIDS in their 20s.
5. My career is solid and I've been working full-time for 32 years so far.
6. Sugar in most forms has been gone from my diet for 28+ years so far and I'm more fit now than I was at 18.
7. I wrote an unpublished memoir of my life from 0 - 30.
8. Relative prosperity is no longer a wild fantasy, and my wife Pat & I co-own two cars and a house.
9. I volunteered to co-lead the Tri-State chapter of our LGBT+ employee group.
10. I became a people manager.
11. I chose to leave people management -- but returned to it ultimately -- so that a couple of colleagues and I could start up a business development team in our company dedicated to the LGBT+ B2B market. So far, it has contributed millions of dollars in attributable company revenue. We also enjoyed positive press and being quoted in a Columbia University Press book on LGBT+ marketing. And serving on a TimesTalk panel on being out at work. Although I chose to move to a different role three years in, it's still going successfully 17 years later.
12. My sisters have children, our niece Zoe and nephews,  Zach, Max and Sam, and I tried to have a child, through nine IUIs, unsuccessfully.
13. A few childhood friends and I revived our friendship, I held onto others from high school and college and made new friends at work, in grad school, at our shul and locally.
14. Two great institutions each granted me a degree, one at the Master's level, and my employer kindly sponsored the Master's part-time while I kept working full-time.
15. Work and vacations have enabled me to become acquainted with many countries, cities and people.
16. Jerusalem was home for a year, Bangalore, for six months, and Chicago and St. Charles, Illinois, for a combo of nine years.
17. I volunteered as a co-anchor of a cable access TV program, "The 10% Show," which showcased news makers of the Chicago LGBT+ community and beyond.
18. With tutoring by my college friend Robyn Weinstein as prep, I chanted the Haftorah for Rosh Hashanah for the LGBT+ congregation we belonged to when we lived in Chicago.
19. Montclair, New Jersey has been home for 22+ years so far. 
20. I was working in New York City on September 11th, 2001.
21. My mom (z"l) & I went to Israel on a Hebrew University global alumni/alumnae trip after the cafeteria was bombed by terrorists and nine people died.
22. This blog has been my muse for more than a decade.
23. I became active in all sorts of social media channels, including behind our firewall at work, where I also created a couple of blogs, and became an active agent of social learning.
24. The University of Michigan chapter of oSTEM flew me in as an alumna to give a talk about my time in Ann Arbor and being out at work in a technology company.
25. Pat & I adopted two American tabby sister-cats, our feline daughters, from the local animal shelter and named them Phoebe and Toonces.
26. Pat & I were married legally in my hometown of Stamford, Connecticut.
27. I became a people manager again and it turned out to be the most compelling of my job roles so far because of the pastoral aspect of it.  
28. Pat & I visited Israel, including our many relatives, twice so far, and I posted My Israel Autobiography on this blog after our second visit.
29. MOOCs, or massive open online courses, emerged and I became a spokesperson on our company's point of view on them.
30. My mom and Pat's mother-in-law (z"l) died in 2014 and Pat's mom and my mother-in-law Bev died eight months later.
31. Toonces died 13 months after Bev and three weeks after Toonce's death, we adopted Lucy, a giant calico, from the same shelter.
32. I led the creation of Watson Academy, which was designed, in Watson's early commercial days, to educate the public and our employees on why Watson matters. It won a Brandon-Hall Gold Award for Best Use of Video for Learning.
33. I was invited to serve on the board of our largest local park's conservancy and am its education leader. We'll host a lecture on New Jersey's hazelnut trees later this month.
34. Our Chief Learning Officer and I started up the Digital Learning Consortium and invited his peers from 21 other companies and academic institutions to join us.
35. I designed a course, Global religion and culture, which we're launching soon. It's my hope to encourage my colleagues and myself to teach one another about our religions and cultures for greater inclusion. And I also hope we commercialize it so that other companies can also be more inclusive around the dimensions of religion, atheism and agnosticism.

Orlando

The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Reprinted from my internal, IBM blog, "Learning to Lead":

In college, in 1984, our Women and Literature professor assigned the novel *Orlando*. In the novel, fog was practically an additional character, as there was deep cloud-cover during the period of Orlando's mystical gender transition. Coincidentally, I remember that in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I read the novel, it was unusually foggy for the duration of my reading that section of the book. And it was a foggy time for me, personally, too, as I was transitioning into allowing myself to own my lesbian identity fully, though it took till senior year ultimately. It actually struck me -- Ann Arbor's weather -- as being empathetic with my own real-life journey, at the time, as I was reading the book.

Now, a week after the mass shooting mostly of LGBT people in Orlando, Florida, perhaps by one of our own people, my head has cleared enough to reflect on it a bit more deeply. On Thursday afternoon, I spoke with Doris Gonzalez, a Latina IBM colleague, who had called to say that she was distraught about Orlando and was thinking about how to piggy-back on the great anti-bullying work that was done by Connie Bonello and Esther Dryburgh and others from IBM in Canada. When we spoke, I was on my way to the San Francisco Airport to head home from a business trip.

"May I tell you a personal story?"

"Of course!"

"The closest I ever came to what happened in Orlando was in Chicago in 1987. I had just moved to Chicago [after graduating from college] and wanted to socialize in the LGBT community, but didn't know where to begin. I found a venue that sounds as ... boring as it was [-- apologies to any Womyn's Music lovers --], the Mountain Moving Coffee House for Womyn and Children. It was at the end of the [lesbian] separatist era and I really don't like womyn's, with a Y music at all [-- I've always been more so a fan of Teena Marie and Patrice Rushen --]​​​, but I went anyhow.

It was held in a church and part-way into the performance, there was a giant BOOM. All of the women in the audience, including me, ducked down in the pews. It didn't turn out to be a bomb. We never learned what it was, but for the few moments, when I was crouched on the floor of that church, I thought, I'm gonna die and all because I came to hear this [lousy] music [because I was so desperate to be among my people, where I could enjoy a Saturday-night haven; I was not open about my sexual orientation at the magazine, where I was interning and so needed the company of others like me all the more so. I remember feeling so alone and awful that I, who had been raised with a deep Jewish identity, should die by myself in a church because I was a lesbian, who was lonely for my people, and then when it turned out to be nothing, I shook off those thoughts and didn't really re-conjure them till this Orlando tragedy and my conversation with this colleague]. But in any case, Doris, all of us went out to clubs in our twenties, didn't we?"

We agreed that it was tragic, since all of us liked to go out dancing back then, whether or not our parents were thrilled with our entertainment choices, and the same thing could have happened to us, that is, in our twenties, Doris and I could have gone to Latin Night (or any night) at a[n LGBT] club -- Doris with a gay friend and I to dance with kindred spirits -- and in fact, I did relatively often, but never was gunned down, thank God.

And now, I'm reminded of how I brought my eldest sister and brother-in-law with me to an LGBT club in 1991, to hear Crystal Waters sing both of her hits at the time. We had "100% pure fun" that night. Talking with my middle sister while in the airport, she recalled our having gone to a club in Chelsea before Chelsea was a gay neighborhood, and with my boyfriend at the time, in 1985 -- I was still on my journey then. Who didn't go out dancing in his or her twenties?

When I read the brief obituaries in today's "New York Times", I saw that only a small number of those killed were not still in their twenties. In general, their bio's weren't yet super-impressive, and neither was mine at that age. Thank God I had more time to amass experience and to make a difference and to learn -- to clear the clouds and make a primarily happy life as a lesbian.

This morning, National Public Radio (NPR) ran a story, where the reporter was covering the Latino angle of the tragedyand I was flooded with poignant IBM memories:

To my knowledge, the first senior executive, who ever said the words, "lesbian and gay" to an auditorium of IBMers was Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, the VP of the Internet Division at the time; it was 1997, though IBM had had a non-discrimination policy in place for gay and lesbian IBMers since 1984. Irving was from Cuba. IBM alumna and now IBM Watson Ecosystem Partner Maria Hernandez and I collaborated back then, so that EAGLE, IBM's LGBT business resource group (BRG) and LatinNet, IBM's Hispanic BRG could co-sponsor Irving's talk on How to Be an IBM Leader. Irving met with both of us together prior to the talk and asked, "What do your constituencies need to hear?"

"Ours just needs to hear you say the words, lesbian and gay," I said; unfortunately, it was 1997 and we were not yet explicitly inclusive of bisexual and transgender IBMers; that happened explicitly a few years later. Still, what we were asking for felt a bit revolutionary, and Irving said, Fine. And then he spoke brilliantly. 

In the mid-90s, "Wired" magazine called Irving Wladawsky-Berger "the smartest person at IBM.” Here are just a few of his remarks:

Well, first of all, the environment in which you exist is all-important. Clearly, if I were talking about a career in Germany in the 1930s, that was not a good place to be Jewish. Being black in the 1950 or '60s in the deep South, some may even say in the North, was not pleasant either. Only more recently have women begun to significantly progress from the point of view of careers while, as far as gays and lesbians are concerned, movement is now beginning.

...what observations do I have about my career, especially given the fact that I'm a minority in more ways than one, being Hispanic, Cuban-born, always speaking with an accent and second, being Jewish? …  Don't waste the energy trying to be what you're not. Be comfortable with who you are because, again, it takes too much energy to pretend to be anyone different ....

You'll never, ever be able to focus on your job if you are concerned with who you are or whether the world accepts who you are because then your energy will be dissipated. If you're comfortable with who you are, if you're comfortable that the world will accept you and that for those people who don't, it's their problem, you have so much more energy.

So, it's a good time to be in IBM. It's a good time to be whoever you are. It's a good time in our country to be whoever you are because we're about as open as I can imagine any nation has been and the rest is up to us as individuals.

The other marvelous memories I have are from the early-2000's, during one of our first IBM Global LGBT Leadership Conferences, if not the very first one:

Bruno Di Leo, who was from Peru, and was then the GM of IBM in Latin America​, flew to IBM in Palisades to address and encourage us as up-and-coming lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender leaders at IBM. Currently, Bruno is the SVP of all of IBM Sales & Distribution, globally, as well as the senior executive sponsor of the LGBT Council at IBM, and Bruno jumped on a web cam to talk about the Orlando tragedy and to reaffirm IBM's inclusiveness and support for all IBMers, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender IBMers. Seeing the short video from Bruno and recalling Irving's remarks makes me realize that since the late-90s, Latino IBM leaders have been among our staunchest allies.

But I want to wind back the clock again finally to the early-2000's; after the penultimate day of sessions, at night, there was ice cream in a common room at the IBM conference center. I didn't want ice cream, but thought I'd go, just for more of the fun company of LGBT IBM colleagues from around the globe. On my way, I heard fantastic music coming from another ballroom-sized room. I peeked in and spotted a bunch of conference goers dancing Salsa. Apparently, they preferred dancing to the ice cream, and so did I, but I was shy.  

Cristina Gonzalez saw me admiring the dancers from the door and invited me to join them. It was the Latin-American conference delegation and they were so welcoming. I felt silly, as all I had ever learned was the cha-cha, and that was when I was taking ballroom and Disco lessons as a pre-teen many years prior, when David Kaplan from my Jewish day school class was my partner; all of us from the school took dance lessons in preparation for the Bar Mitzvah circuit. Dancing with Cristina and others was much, much more fun. No offense meant to David, who was a fine, 12-year-old dancer, and still a kind friend and ally today .... "Who's singing?" I asked Cristina. "She's gorgeous."

"That's Celia Cruz", Cristina told me.

The next and final day of the conference, Cristina came up to me and handed me an envelope and told me it was a gift. In it was the Celia Cruz CD that had been playing the night prior. We beamed at each other.

The NPR radio report about Orlando ended with Celia Cruz, singing "Yo viviré (I will Survive)". And we will survive, and thrive, as long as we follow Irving Wladawsky-Berger's advice.  I just wish I weren't imagining dancing in a bullet-proof vest at the moment. I will get past such thinking. I'm glad I read *Orlando* in my twenties and lived beyond those decades to gain clear-headedness about who I am. And I will keep dancing.

Michigan: Day One Memories

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Poem

Never saw the country west of
Pennsylvania prior to Day One of
My Freshman year in Ann Arbor.

Do you also try to be reminded of
More familiar people, places et al
When you are in a strange environment?

State Street reminded me of a patch of
Downtown New Canaan -- just for a moment --
And that calmed me.

Where are you from? So many held up hands
Like Mittens and pointed to a spot with
Their other hand.

Benton Harbor...Birmingham...Bloomfield Hills...
No suburbs I'd ever heard of. What was I doing
There?

Michigan was more foreign to me than Israel,
where I had a grandmother, aunt and many cousins.
Michigan squirrels had dark-orange-ish, not gray, fur.

Filling Up on Memories With My Omelet & Soup

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Fighting Wistfulness

My former classmate and Phil Jones Dance partner and I have lunch this afternoon; at 12, we took lessons in preparation for many upcoming Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and for life. We were also at the University of Michigan at the same time, but I don't have much memory of that till he reminds me:

"The last time I saw you was in 1985, in the Fishbowl [the all-glass part of Mason Hall in Ann Arbor]. You seemed really uncomfortable; in fact, whenever I ran into you on campus you seemed uncomfortable, but that day, you were with some girls and one of them --"

"-- had a mullet?"

"Yes, and one's hair was multicolored."

"Well, the one with the mullet is a guy now." (Not sure he's heard me.) "Really. He was a guy back then, too; he's transgender, but hadn't yet transitioned and I didn't know then, but yeah, that was really awkward, seeing you then."

He nods acknowledgment and then says, "You know, if you hadn't acted so odd, I'd have never guessed about you, but since you did, I realized [that you were a lesbian], and thought, She probably doesn't want her mom to know, and I never told a soul."

"Well, you were who I was supposed to want -- you, a good-looking, smart, nice, tall, Jewish man and so of course, I felt awkward."

He's flattered, but what is there to say in response?

Our Dads (z"l)

Both of them died at 56, of the identical, rare cancer. We agree that we became adults overnight at the time. His dad (z"l) died in '88, when he was 22 and mine (z"l), in '82, when I was 17 -- right around the same time of year, within two weeks of each other. I sit there, feeling jealous and competitive; at least his dad saw him graduate from high school and college.

Overall...

He is a gentleman, a mensch.

I have yet to regret getting together with anyone from my Stamford past.

This lunch, plus Teena Marie's passing earlier this week, are making me feel tons of pre-teen and adolescent memories. I'd rather feel my feelings than ignore them, I guess. How can I channel them for further good, though?

Observing My Grief

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

With Apologies to C.S. Lewis

"I feel sad," I told a friend tonight.

"Feel it," she said.

"Yeah, otherwise, the grief just comes back and bites me...." I agreed. Here is why I am sad:

None of the sororities at the University of Michigan asked me to pledge when I rushed in 1983.

Last night, on the way out of class, while exiting Columbia University's Teachers College, where my employer graciously is sponsoring my Masters, I dialed a college-friend and said, "I'm walking out of this great university to my fancy Volvo in an Armani suit and I feel awful....In class, in small groups, we analyzed an article by a black lesbian around my age, about how she joined and then quit a sorority at the U. of I. in the '80s....I have all of this stuff and yet none of it can keep me from feeling second-class."

When we were University of Michigan dormmates, my friend was incredulous that I went through Rush. She never really knew how devastating an experience it was for me. And the extra indignity of having a gorgeous, random roommate sophomore year, who pledged the Tri-Delt sorority, tied with Chi Omega as the top sorority on campus. Her mainstreamness, and that of the beautiful friends -- her sorority sisters who would stop by our room too routinely -- opened my Freshman wound, which festered all year long; living with such a perfect woman, I proved awkward with a mean edge.

That summer, as part of a birthday present, my friend thought she was funny by sending me a whole pad of Delta Delta Delta stationery, with a "Ghostbusters" symbol through the three deltas on the top of every page. I laughed along even as I still felt ashamed that I had not even remotely qualified to join that club.

Outsider Status-symbols

During class last night, our professor showed us amazing clips from "The Way Home," by the World Trust, which highlighted exclusionary experiences of biracial women from a variety of cultures -- a very different sort of sorority. Afterwards, one of my classmates spoke of her experience, growing up in Japan with a Portuguese father and of her own half-White daughter's experience of going to Japanese School on Saturdays.

My classmate's story encouraged me to talk about what I hadn't discussed when we were explicating the "Sistah Outsider" article. I raised my hand.

"Yes, Sarah?"

"I appreciated Cathy's story and it made me want to say a couple of things. In another class, I had a classmate, who grew up as half-WASP and half-Jewish and she said she envied me my solid identity, and I couldn't imagine anyone, considering me privileged for being *Jewish,* a tiny minority that's had to move all over the place throughout history." Sarah, be courageous. Say what you really want to say, I told myself.

"And I didn't say this during the window when we were talking about the 'Sistah Outsider" article--"

"That's OK," said my professor in a kindly tone.

"But I really related to her story, except that I'm Jewish and she's black. I remember thinking, Should I try to get into the WASPiest sorority possible, or should I aim for at least the more prestigious of the two Jewish sororities? What if the friendlier, but less prestigious, one invited me to pledge?

If I got into a sorority, it would be proof that I was a real woman, and I could escape my lesbianism, I reasoned. And then I was invited back to the next round only by the least desirable sorority on campus. [Choking up,] My mom had been in a sorority [that wasn't on my campus....]." How raw I felt!

A Layer-cake, Layered with Shame

It was always a layered shame for me -- my wish to be a sorority-girl: I was ashamed that I wanted to join a sorority; ashamed that none would have me; ashamed that I really believed I could prove my heterosexuality through sorority membership. If anything, it would have been a far more difficult place to try to hide my lesbianism.

I never felt lonelier those first several weeks of Freshman year than when I would put on a skirt, leave all of my new friends behind at the dorm, all of whom thought sororities were ill-suited to their sensibilities, and ride the bus from North Campus to Washtenaw Avenue, or Sorority/Fraternity Row. My father was dead, I was in a new place, where I'd never been till Day 1 of Freshman year, never having moved at all, and nourishing a dream of universal popularity and highly-visible good-deeds.

One of the sororities -- the one that had the cartoonist of Cathy among its alumna if I remember correctly -- promised that the next round of Rush would feature an peppermint social. I could taste the ice cream as the interviewer spoke. I never did get to, though.

A Colleague's Questions and My Answers

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

In Response to a Paper I Wrote During Spring Semester

The course I took this past semester was the most draining and most profound I've taken so far at Teachers College. It was on Educational Biography and Leadership, and the core assignment was for all of us to write our own learning history and how it informed our leadership, and then to exchange papers with one another.

One of the colleagues with whom I shared the paper kindly wrote a number of questions to me in response to having read mine, including:

Q: In addition to her being your “teacher”, was she [your sister] also a friend, or was there a “teacher-student” distance between you? Were you always close with her, or did that sort of evolve as you grew up?

A: She was my teacher and my friend, though I did turn her into an icon to adore, and she had to tell me when she was 18 and I was nearly 13 that she was "not Superman" and I needed to stop treating her as such. That shocked me, to know that she had felt my adoration at all as a burden.

Q: The whole section on your father, and his wishes for you, touched me so much. His encouraging you to write for the newspaper especially....Why do you think you didn’t stick with it, after you had some articles published? Was this your own negative beliefs about your abilities tripping you up?

A: (My colleague was referring to my having written a bit for "The Michigan Daily" as a freshman.) If I were providing the answer back then, I'd tell you that it was a luxury I couldn't continue to afford -- I had to study and work for 10 hours a week while in school and also was studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for my whole junior year -- but really, I agree that it was a combination of giving up before I started and also letting it be the province of a friend on whom I had a crush at the time. Both of us wrote for the "Arts" page and she kept at it, but when our friendship diminished (because she discovered my crush and rebuffed me, which was another tragic story), I didn't want to be around her as much and vice versa.

And yes, I think I couldn't believe how easy it was to get published -- it overwhelmed me. Though I had been an active reporter for my high school newspaper, "The Roundtable," at the college level, at a newspaper that had its own art deco building on campus (which it shared with "The Gargoyle," the school's humor magazine), it seemed like the college journalistic equivalent of being on the Michigan football team. I didn't feel worthy on some level, I guess. And yet the articles I wrote were clever. The best of the few were a feature story for the weekend magazine on the 10th anniversary of the Saturday midnight showing of "Harold and Maude;" another, a review of a gallery opening, including Richard Diebenkorn; and a review of "The Flamingo Kid," a film I liked because of its star, Matt Dillon.

Q: I loved the “Full Moon at Noon” story. Do you still have a copy of it? And if so, would you be willing to share it? (if not that’s fine, I understand!)....What part of him [my father, may his memory be blessed] is still with you, held close? Can you take in, now, that belief that he had in you, his vision of your potential?

A: Unfortunately, I don't know where that story is. It was from the typewriter era. If I had it, I'd be happy to share it in its entirety. I've written about my dad's particular legacy for me before, but not lately. I feel like I got nearly all of his height (he was six feet tall and I'm five nine and a half), and his creativity/sometimes childlike enthusiasm, and also, the self-doubt that can go with being an artist, or with being any sort of human. And also his appetite. He referred to his alma mater as the "Rhode Island School of Desire" (rather than the Rhode Island School of Design) because he developed, and aimed to satisfy, his learning longings so fully while there as an Industrial Design major. He was a toy and game designer professionally and so I always relish opportunities to work with designers in my work at IBM.

It's a touching question about whether I can fully see the belief he had in me and my potential now in hindsight because I don't remember any such conversations, other than that one, where he encouraged me to go to the University of Michigan and write for the school newspaper. And then by November 1st of my senior year of high school, he had died.

In 1995, I had a dream about my father that devastated me initially: In real-life, I had proposed that IBM be a major sponsor of the International Gay & Lesbian Business Expo (that's what it was called back then, and it was pioneering of the sponsor-companies then). IBM agreed and 24 gay and lesbian IBMers staffed a giant booth at the Expo and we were swarmed with thrilled customers and future customers the whole time. In addition, my colleague and friend Rob Shook and I gave a business workshop, "Cruising the Information Highway," which again, back then was pioneering, and happily, popular.

The night before the workshop, I dreamt that I was helping to set up the booth, taking flyers out of the pedestal cabinets to post on the pedestals and my dad was crouching alongside me as I was bending over to get the fliers. The only statement I recall of his from the dream was, "I'm sorry, Sarah, but I can't stay." And then he disappeared.

I cried about it to my oldest sister right before co-facilitating what turned out to be a wonderful workshop. I was upset that he couldn't stay because I figured he must not have been able to abide by the mission I was serving, didn't approve of my being lesbian and working to advance gay and lesbian business professionals' success.

At my next session with the therapist I was seeing then, I told her the dream and how hurt by it I was. She said, "Don't you see, Sarah? Your father was apologizing. He was sorry that he couldn't be with you for this important event."

I didn't fully believe my therapist, but it was a possible alternate interpretation, and since then, I've tried to believe in her version.

Q: I am so sorry that you were not able to give birth. Does that desire really feel like it has passed, as you write in your narrative, or do you still think about it with regret?...Does that “not being able to empathize with parents” feel troubling? Does your family accept that “inconceivable” part of you? Were they supportive of you trying to conceive, and when they found out you couldn’t? How does not having given birth affect you now, and the choices you make? Are you trying to give birth in figurative ways?

A: Mostly, it has passed. The regret I feel is that I do not feel driven to adopt a child; it's a shame-based regret, really, i.e., I wish I wanted to be any child's mother badly enough to go to any lengths, but I don't, I must admit. The troubling part of not being able to empathize with parents is most apparent to me when I think of my sisters as mothers. They have something in common with each other that I do not share with them.

My family mostly accepts my not having given birth. My mother, I think, is addicted to grandchildren. I was 42 (and still am till July 13th) when Pat and I were in India, and my mother said to me once long-distance, "Sarah, I read that there are many women in India, who would be willing to carry your eggs." I felt much more sad in response to her suggestion than she knew, but I realized that she meant well and could not resist making it, and so I never told her how much pain it caused.

My ability to go to India for six months with Pat for work was possible because we did not have a child, I think; though I saw expats from many countries, living in India with children and teens, including my local manager, who had brought his family from China, I don't think I would have had the wherewithal to do it.

Pat's and my relationship also feels more peaceful than many couples' I've seen, who've got kids. There is less stress, emotionally and financially. There is also less vividness, I believe, and that's a kind of regret, too. I am always trying to nurture people, especially myself, if not also trying to give birth figuratively. Increasingly, I think of my legacy and how I'll need to have a more public one -- or that I aspire to have a more public one -- since there's no guarantee of a next generation, feeling it directly; we have a niece and three nephews, but they will think of their parents' legacy primarily.

Q: I was struck by the fact that you mention realizations that come “after swimming” twice....I was curious – does swimming, or physical activity in general, serve as a means of insight or connection to inner knowing for you? I am interested in somatic knowing/learning...and always find myself noticing and wondering when someone makes the connection between physical activity and knowing. Is this a conscious process for you (meaning, do you use physical activity consciously to resolve inner dilemmas or gain insight)? Or does it just sort of happen? (I read your swimming autobiography on your blog, but it didn’t really answer my questions!)

A: My partner Pat bought a water-tight iPod case that she swims with and I worry about getting one for myself, since I use swimming to improve my mood, to clear my head, to help me think, to relax my spirit, to sing pop songs to myself when no thoughts are urgent and to plan for the coming day's work. I don't get into the pool, promising myself that I'll have breakthrough insights, but often, insights come in parallel with the repetitive stroke I'm doing lap after lap...as if doing movement on auto-pilot enables sharper thinking at the same time.

As a leadership development facilitator, I learned that if I gave program participants things to play with while they were learning, they'd actually focus more so on the learning and be less distracted, e.g., squeeze-balls et al. Also, I feel much more connected to their learning and my own if I shake hands with participants when they first enter the classroom. It's like a mini learning exchange for me with each handshake.

Finally, I read a year or more ago that most leaders are physically graceful, rather than clumsy. I wonder if there's a connection there, i.e., perhaps leaders are more conscious, but not self-conscious, of their bodies and their minds in parallel. Ever since reading that, I've been even more driven to appear graceful when I am in front of a group of people, and even one-to-one.