Learning=Life

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

Feeling Alive When Learning

There's little that's more delicious than being an agent of others' learning all day and then getting to go to a class at night, where it's someone's job to be an agent of *my* learning.

My head was pounding by the end of class tonight, but it was a sweet headache. It's pounding further now, but it's worth it.

In my Time & Learning class tonight, we spoke of discretionary time and rhythmanalysis compared with psychoanalysis, and "Deaf Time" and time duration vs. experience in connection with resumes, and the different sense of rhythm of people with ADD and more.

At the end of class our professor handed us an article he wrote, "Moment and a Theory of Moments." So far, after a quick read, I'm most intrigued by the distinction made in the article between an instant and a moment. Alhadeff-Jones (2009) wrote on how instants really are shorter than moments, and quoted Hess (2004), who wrote that moments can have a ritual resonance preceding and following them.

Even as I'm beat from a day that began at 7 am and went till 7 pm, not including the car-ride back to Armonk from NYC, I felt so alive, driving back.

I blasted the radio and while channel-surfing, happened on Rod Stewart's "Young Turks." The chorus made me feel even more alive:

Young hearts be free tonight, time is on your side.
Young hearts be free tonight, time is on your side.
Young hearts be free tonight, time is on your side.

Young hearts gotta run free, be free, live free
Time is on, time is on your side
Time, time, time, time is on your side
is on your side
is on your side
is on your side
Young heart be free tonight
tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, yeah[!]

Home Sick/Homesick

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

Stomach Problem

I won't regale you with details of my illness, but suffice it to say that I am not wearing Indian clothing today -- the pants of the Salwar Kameez take longer to undo and do -- and I want to be as near to a bathroom as possible. OK, I couldn't resist a little detail to help you suffer along with me.

I wasn't going to blog, as I told my local manager that I'd likely not be online today, but actually, I've been unable to stay away -- just monitoring e-mail, rather than doing anything substantial.

The day feels OK from a break-taking standpoint in any case, since I worked over much of the weekend and didn't rest then. My family and my U.S. manager want me not to work so continuously. There are two main reasons that I do:

My colleagues here seem to do so; I am helping in arenas of leadership development (LD), where I haven't prior, and need the extra time to explore how to be effective in helping, e.g., in designing content for LD programs, rather than delivering it, which is my historical area of expertise.

"Memory is useful. Nostalgia is less so." -- Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum

Last week, I gave that unsolicited and attributed tip to one of my colleagues here because it seemed to me that he was referring to the company he came from too often and nostalgically, and that it might negatively affect the morale of the people he leads.

He wrote down, "Memory - Nostalgia" and circled each and responded that it was the best tip he had been given in a very long time.

I waver between feeling that I need to take Rabbi Kleinbaum's advice and giving myself a break and realizing that it's understandable that I'd try to grab onto familiar cultural references et al in an environment that's so remote from the one I came from....And then I feel like such a baby, as a friend of mine spent six months in Azerbaijan, and not in the sort of comfortable housing we're in.

If only I could simply surrender to the local culture and stop watching "AbFab" re-runs and lurking on Librarything.com, smiling at all of the books I recall having read over my lifetime so far.

If I give myself a break, I say that I'm doing my best and trying to make a difference for the leadership of our company, and as a bonus, I have inevitable cross-cultural experiences with my colleagues.

Last night, we watched a fantastic movie, "Mr. and Mrs. Iyer," which my best friend here and colleague gave me for my birthday. I am learning from Indians just by being here; it was a movie that was mostly in English with some Tamil, which is her native language, and we loved it.

Are Indians learning from me, just by my being here? Or how can I help the learning exchange be richer? I know that I need to be, and stay, open to it.