New Year Reflections

Prompted by Questions from Our Rabbi

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

In a Shanah tovah / Happy Jewish New Year greeting to congregants, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum asked:

Think back on the year since last Rosh Hashanah...Where have you been this year?

• Geographically
• Emotionally
• Relationship-wise
• Work-wise
• Friendships
• Family
• Who have you lost this year?
• Who have you become?
• What makes you proud?
• What makes you ready to face some changes?
• How have you spent your time? Your money? Your love?
• What would a chart of your year look like with highs and lows?
• Where do you want to be next year at this time?
• What relationships can be given a little help right now?
• What phone calls are you putting off?
• What cemetery visits haven't you done that you've wanted to do?
• What conversations have you avoided?

Just seeing these questions reminded me of how I miss this blog. At its best, it lets me make sense of my experiences and re-live them through writing about them. And yet, I've gone from blogging an average of ~three times a week, 2007-2009, to a bit more than twice a month on average. And where I was tweeting, on average, at least once daily, as well as posting to Facebook daily, since mid-yearish, it feels like I'm tweeting three times a week and not posting on Facebook daily.

How do my reflections breathe air when I'm posting them less frequently? Am I talking more with people face to face, using photographs to express myself now more so, or am I reflecting less often? Maybe it's all of these.

The rabbi's questions tempt me to pray about my hopes in response to a number of them and I'll yield to that temptation here:

God, please help me to be visibly adaptable, appreciative, attentive, compassionate, fair, giving, grateful, useful, wise, idea-filled, receptive to others' ideas, resilient, healthy, hopeful and humorous. Amen.

Each of Us is on Our Own Path

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

Humility is the Key

Today, I received the roster of the section I'll be facilitating for the leadership development program we offer for brand new executives at our company. Uh-oh, I recognized a name. Uh-oh, we started working for our company around the same time. Uh-oh, can my ego take it that he's an executive and I'm not? Uh-oh, will my being his facilitator make him self-conscious with his learning?

That last worry, I'm pretty confident, was my projection. Will I be self-conscious in my facilitation with him, being among the learners?

Should I go ask to have him switched, I wondered. I sat at my desk, pondering what to do until I was distracted by the memory of a great trip to Milan that he and I were lucky to take. It was for an ibm.com training class back in the day.

There's a photo of him with two female colleagues and me, all of us looking unusually European -- well, one of us was from Vienna, so she was entitled to look European. It's on my wall in my office.

Whoever's class he's in, should I invite him up to my office during a break to see a picture of us from a decade ago? Would he find it sweet? Would he remember?

Why did he become an executive and I, not yet? Usually, I console myself, considering, there are nearly 400,000 IBMers worldwide and only ~5,000 executives worldwide, and so it would be a huge deal to become one...especially in a technology company when my expertise and education are not in a technical field.

When IBM came to campus my senior year, I didn't bother to interview with the company, figuring, What would IBM want with a Comparative Literature major? How I got here is another story, to tell another day, but for tonight, I need to come back to the present and pray.

My Prayer

God, please let me be useful and of service to the 16 participants, who will be learning in the section I'm facilitating, beginning at 8 am on Wednesday, and going through midday on Friday. Let me be rid of my ego.

Let me help the learners have a wonderfully-rich, memorable experience during this milestone in their careers.

Let me treat my particular colleague well and be humble and confident in my facilitation. Let him and me be comfortable in our respective roles. Let me be pleasantly surprised by how we learn together this week, and by any other experiences that I can't anticipate or know ahead of time. Amen.

Survivor's Guilt

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

Trying Not to Suffer from It

In the past few months, a number of my friends have experienced their last day at work, involuntarily. Job-loss feels scarier for me to discuss here than nearly any other topic I can imagine.

I've steeled myself and compartmentalized the losses mostly, but also have happily surprised myself that I was not inhuman when I heard from these friends by e-mail. Unlike some of our friends as it turned out, I did not treat them like they were contagious.

Times like these will test one's humanity. I'm glad to be passing the test.

Still, no matter the compassion and presentness I've demonstrated for my friends, I've managed to keep pumping and producing...and to feel a good deal of survivor's guilt along the way.

More than an Academic Discussion

In class tonight, we talked of social time and how time feels when one is unemployed. I remember my dad's unemployment in the '70s. I'd have enjoyed having him around more so, as we did when he was out of work, if only he hadn't always been pre-occupied with looking for a job!

And then he and my mom went into the lamp business -- actually manufacturing them(!) Necessity is the mother of invention.

My father designed the lamps, my sisters and I cut felt bases for them, my mother wrote the hang-tag copy for them and my parents hired boys from the technical high school to work by the hour on assembling them. My mother became a traveling salesperson and carried them into lamp- and gift-stores, and department-stores in pet cases because all of them were animals -- hippos, elephants, cats, owls....One of the coolest times of their marriage wouldn't have happened had my dad not become unemployed.

Please, God, I love what I do and hope never to lose my job. I suppose I'm telling the story above, again, out of survivor's guilt, i.e., cool things can happen after a job loss....

My Own, Original Prayer

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

For the New Year

Please, God, let me contribute to a better world daily, or even very often. Let me remember to ask you for help when I feel anxious or sad.

Please keep my loved ones and me physically and mentally healthy, and animatedly alive.

Help me continue to be a loving parent to our kitties, Phoebe and Toonces, and let me continue appreciating how lucky I am to have Pat's love and dedication.

Please help me to be not only positively contributory, but creative and original in doing so...but please don't make me or my product so unique that no one can relate to it.

Short-term, please help motivate me to be as engaged as I've been historically in my Masters program and keep me pumping my help to all of the projects I'm part of at work with humility, but not with too much humility.

God, please help me continue to love my body through swimming for exercise regularly and by eating only foods that are healthy for me. And please help me go to sleep earlier, so that I get at least seven hours of sleep the majority of nights.

Overall, help me remain gracious, funny, positive, inclusive, community-oriented and hopeful, and alert to Your presence, and to all of the special moments and people and things that I notice when I stay present with what and who is around me, rather than when I'm self-absorbed.

Please let this year be full of love and adventure and good health for everyone, including me. Amen.

Praying for the Bombing to Stop

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

On Friday morning, Pat heard a quick news item on the radio while I was getting ready for work. "There has been a bombing in Bangalore."

I drove to work and looked for Bangalore-based colleagues and friends on our instant messaging system and found some. All of their families and friends were OK. Then I went on an e-mail writing campaign, sending notes with my prayers for their safety to everyone with whom I worked closely while on assignment there for six months last year.

All of them were safe, thank God.

This morning, I woke up to learn that more bombs went off over the weekend, this time in Ahmedabad, where I have a colleague with whom I worked fairly closely for some months. I've written to him. He's due to come to Armonk in a couple of weeks.

During my assignment, Pat and I were so frustrated by how elaborate a process it was to get a cell-phone number. A representative from the cell phone service provider came to our house to ensure that we really lived there. This rendezvous took weeks and weeks to make happen. We were so annoyed...but it was all about Security, to ensure that we were who we claimed we were. Standard practice.

Just about every day that my driver -- same driver, same vehicle -- pulled into the IBM parking lot on Bannerghatta Road, a Security guard checked the trunk and under the car. I can only imagine the Security precautions now.

It's unnerving to be so far away from there now. And I have assignee's guilt, I think, that I'm not living there permanently -- especially when I think of a couple of colleagues, who are still in India, still on assignment.

It's amazing to have so many people about whom I care if they live or die, who live nine and a half hours ahead of me. When I lived in Jerusalem from July, 1985 to July, 1986, there was a bomb at a Hebrew University campus bus stop and I walked by it after it had happened, on my way to a final exam. What if I had walked by it earlier?

And I was in New York City on September 11th, but uptown, at Madison and 57th. What if I had been at the World Financial Center instead? Early that morning, we had met by phone to discuss a potential project for a client based there, and then I drove into Manhattan, just as the first plane crashed into the first tower; I had a shocking view of the building right after it happened, from across the river, before entering the Lincoln Tunnel....Times like this remind me of times like that.

And we keep going and living our lives until our time is up. I'm reminded to be grateful for whatever time I have left.

Blogging Before We Go

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

Once More While on American Soil

I just splashed on Forest Essentials Aloe Vera & Mint Natural Astringent from the Himalayas, which I still had from my hotel stay during my last (and first) trip to Bangalore in July, 2005.

Now, I'm exhausted and olfactorily stimulated in parallel -- an odd combination...but no more odd than the other combinations I'm feeling during this last, pre-flight hour in our home; I am queasy and bold and anxious and psyched and jangled and calm and my throat hurts and I feel like singing and laughing and sleeping for hours.

My carry-on has my bathingsuit and goggles, to ensure I can swim when we get there, if my throat calms down.

Happily, we've already got plans to have lunch on Saturday with an Irish friend, who's also in Bangalore on assignment, and then we hope to meet with an Indian friend and colleague and her daughters on Sunday.

Please, God, let our flight leave on time, let our luggage not be delayed, let our ride show up at the airport (which did not happen last time), keep our families' health stable and let my sinus' health be restored. Amen.