Pause. Step back a moment. - Day 28

28th December 2018

28 is the curing time for concrete - curing concrete is the term used for stopping freshly
poured concrete from drying out too quickly. This is done because concrete, if left to dry out of
its own accord, will not develop the full bond between all of its ingredients. It will be weaker
and tend to crack. During curing hydration occurs, allowing calcium-silicate hydrate (C-S-H) to form.
Over 90% of a mix's final strength is typically reached within 28 days. Concrete is the most
used construction material in the world.

I'm back to work today. I have new clothes to wear, a few treats in my bag to cheer me during the day and the music from Hansel and Gretel as an earworm. 

I am in awe of the lady who wrote today's post - it is candid and well balanced, but it must have been hard putting her thoughts onto the page. I would like to thank her for her contribution (she is a regular writer for the series) and also for being such a valued member of the HR and L&D social media-linked community.

Today's post is by Rachel Burnham, a learning and development consultant, sketch-noter and designer based near Manchester. Rachel works with trainers, L&D professionals and HR teams to help them modernise their approaches and become more effective. Rachel, as you can surmise from the sketchnoting is highly creative. The photographs for today's piece are taken by Rachel herself. Rachel is a talented lady. She writes an excellent L&D focused blog - L & D Matters and is active on social media (you can follow her on Twitter via @BurnhamLandD). When not drawing, reading or helping others to learn, Rachel enjoys spending time with her nearest and dearest and has a passion for gardening (as you can tell from the below piece). She is also a keen jazz aficionado - a cultured lady. Reading between the lines you can see that 2018 has been a challenging year for Rachel but that she has found a way through. She is brave, resourceful, honest and resilient.

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Pause. Step back a moment.

In the spring of 2017, my son and I took a day trip from the island of Mykonos, to the nearby island of Delos.  This was our second trip to Greece – part of the big shake up in our family life.  Sam is a history nerd and so we spend these trips visiting museums and archeological sites – the only beaches I have visited in Greece have had nearby ruins and that’s fine with me – I am getting a great second-hand classical education and it is rather wonderful when an adult child chooses to have you as a holiday companion.

It was a hot day – deep clear blue sky and even early in the morning it was blazing hot.  The island of Delos is one huge archeological site – one fascinating ruin, statue, and pillar after another – far more than it is really possible to take in in a single day.  And on this April morning it was also full of wild flowers – self-seeded all through the walls and floors were vivid red poppies, purple mallow, chamomile, vetch - cousins of garden plants I know and love here in the UK, but smaller, more intensely coloured and billowing everywhere across this small island.  As the heat intensified, we explored the remains of villas, shops, streets, temples and a theatre.  Buildings once grand and lavish – though I was captivated by a drain from some indoor plumbing and the complex water tank system used to store water captured from the roof of the theatre.

Half-way up a hill, we turned in to the courtyard and colonnade of a villa, which seemed more sturdy and upright than many of the other parts of the site.  And in these rooms found the most wonderful, not-much damaged mosaic floors. 

We looked and looked at them.

I love mosaics.  As a child I remember seeing Roman mosaics found in the UK shown on television – probably Blue Peter.  I had a phase of cutting up magazines to create piles of colour-ordered roughly rectangle scraps of paper, which I then used to make mosaic pictures. Tesserae from paper. It took hours. I’m not sure I would ever have the patience now.

When you look closely at a mosaic you sometimes lose sight of the picture – of the images, pattern and story.  As you focus, you home in on the tesserae and pick out the mix of shades and colours – the individual tiny tiles that the artist used to create their picture with.   Sometimes as you focus in on an area representing the sea or sky you are able to distinguish the mix of hues – shades of blue, dark and stormy,cornflower, to the palest blue, and mixed in a stone or two of sea-green, or a speckle of white and cream or brightest of all a gleam of gold.

And that is what my year has been – a mosaic.  Some stormy blue days of heartache, many many days of the palest blue of work and home and the doing of life, a taste of sea-green and speckles of pure gold. 

Part of the heartache for me is that this is my first full year since I separated from my husband, after 33 years together – which has been a very sad thing, but through recognizing that things had gone wrong between us, also has led to new hopes and a new phase in our lives.  We continue to share a house and I am incredibly proud that we have both worked at finding a way to still be a family.  Somehow we are finding our way back to being good friends.

I have been learning how to manage holiday seasons when on my own – a bit of a mixed experience – I actually like time on my own – good for recharging, great for reading, which is one of my passions, it gives me time for drawing and is a necessary balance to the social busyness of my work and volunteering.  But I find it is a bit tricky to get the balance right and I have had one or two wobbly Saturday nights when I would really rather of had some company. 

I have had heartaches too in my professional life – real blue days.  Back in March, I had one of those horrible times that so many of us face of a total loss of confidence – when you are independent there can be times when you don’t win contracts, when you don’t just feel rejected, but are rejected and even when you have been freelance for 18 years as I have, it doesn’t make it any less challenging to deal with.  I had a very long and tearful phone call one wet Wednesday with my closest friend before I moved into a more sea-green state.

Towards the end of the year, I made a poor decision and ended up letting down a client.  Definitely a low and very blue moment.

And there have been other times of hope, fulfillment and great contentment – a great times introducing groups to Sketchnoting in both Manchester and London, reading student reflective blogs on their learning from a programme, hosting CakeCamp evenings, co-leading a session at NAP with Mike Shaw, lots and lots of fabulous live music – jazz of course, but also being swept away at a performance of Tosca, drawing a picture of my father that actually looks like him!  

When your life is busy, sometimes you don’t have a sense of the whole picture, what the pattern is.   It rushes by and all of a sudden it’s the near the end of the year and it seems a blur – all of a murkiness.
  

But when you pause.  When you step back.  When you seek out and sense the pattern, then you can see the whole picture.

And now that I have paused, I see that this year has been full of golden moments and days as well.  Sitting outside and eating our first meal in the garden in the sun – not realizing then that this year it would be the first of many.   Visiting Delphi with Sam – breathing in the scent of oregano on a sunny hillside.  Conversations in the course of a piece of research.   Working with Gem Dale and a whole team of folk to put on a conference on flexible working.   Trying out so many new things but particularly starting flamenco classes.  Cutting back a shrub on a very cold day in February and the beautiful blue hibiscus flowers that resulted in July.  Cricket on a super hot day with friends. And more.

(Blue hibiscus)

And what stands out is that it was the people who made this year – students, clients, volunteers, co-workers, new friends to draw with, family, my closest friend and Sam. The people who see you through the heartache, who you share hopes with and dream dreams with and celebrate every small win with.  It’s the people who make the year.  Thank you.

Rachel Burnham

Life in Chiaroscuro - Day 52

Day 52 (Sunday 21st January 2018)

52 - the age at which Harry Houdini died - by this time he had amazed and baffled people
in much of Europe, Russia and the U.S.A. On 21st January 1903 he escaped Halvemaansteeg
police station in Amsterdam. 1903 was the year when Houdini really became an icon - he was
already known for being good at escaping handcuffs but he now began to make a name
for breaking out of jails. he also managed to break into a safe for a Moscow locksmith
(who had been trying to do so for 14 years) revealing a treasure trove of jewels and
earning Houdini $750 for 9 hours work (a significant sum at the time).

Today is my husband's birthday and we are going out for a family lunch. His mother is coming to celebrate with us. She is finding life without her husband very hard. Death is, in so many ways, so painful for those of us left behind.

The post you read today is by Jacqueline Davies. It is open, honest and at times a painful read (as well as being the second post in a row with a wonderful poem  written by the contributor). Jacqueline says much about herself below, so I will only say a few words... Some of you may remember Jacqueline's Call To Arms in the final post of last year's series. At the time of writing last year she was the Master of the Guild of Human Resource Professionals (@GuildHRprofs) and the first openly lesbian Master of any City of London Guild. She was also the HR Director for the FCA (the regulatory body for much of the Financial Services industry) - a huge and demanding role. In her post she made a statement of the role of HR that has resonated with me this year, we need to be:

"standard bearers for the best of what it means to be human. To hold ourselves and others to account and to be provocative when we see integrity or conduct threatened."

I genuinely believe that HR as a profession is in the best position I have ever known it to be in. Increasingly leaders, colleagues, clients and the communities in which we work are becoming aware of the importance of culture and conduct. That does not mean we should be complacent or smug - someone in HR clearly turned a blind eye to inappropriate behaviour in Miramax when Harvey Weinstein was at his most predatory. We need HR to be the moral compass (it is no coincidence that a compass is the symbol of the HR Guild here in the UK) and to ask the difficult questions. Since leaving the FCA Jacqueline has teamed up with Tania in their own business consultancy and I think you can tell from its name that she will not be shrinking from facing things head-on - Audacity Associates. In addition, she is an advisor to the Henley Business School, a Governor of Middlesex University and Chair of the National Skills Academy for Financial Services. You can connect with her on social media - her Twitter handle is @JacquelineLD.

The beautiful Chiaroscuro paintings and photographs used to illustrate this piece have all been selected by Jacqueline.

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The Italian’s use the term Chiaroscuro to describe scenes painted in ‘light-dark’, how tonal contrasts are created to provide shape, show character and tell stories.

Life in Chiaroscuro

Seven years ago my mother died. More precisely, I gave my consent for her life support to be switched off, then she died. This decision has weighed heavily with me, replaying while I wait for sleep and returning at dawn before I can crowd it out with plans for the day. This isn’t a post about grief, it’s a post about how we can re-mix the colours on our palette to make sense of living with both darkness and dawn. How I’ve learned that a ‘Chiaroscuro filter’ can distinguish the things that matter from the beautiful, daily distractions that fill our life’s canvas.

You see I lost my Mum some thirty years earlier. She disappeared inside a black cloak of depression. Up-to this point, she loved us unconditionally and taught us how to love back. As we progressed though high school, quite suddenly everything changed. She was unable to go out, unable to get up and when she did was so heavily medicated that when we looked into her eyes we couldn’t find her. This would mean returning from school never knowing if she would be in the kitchen or in bed or if the paracetamol packets would be empty. My father, a steelworker worked around the clock. My younger sister and I found coping strategies. I had wanted to be a painter, but being the oldest, I took charge and I followed my father’s lead; I dropped Art, working relentlessly until I could flee to university. I didn’t stop; travelling like a train through a tunnel, on and on while decades flashed by through the half-light.

The Young Singer by Georges de La Tour

Then, just before I turned 40, the same age Mum was when she became ill, I sat in the hospital, holding her hand and let her go. Just a year before, I had become a Mum and the wonder of holding a new life while letting another go, meant that even the most brilliant moments were outlined by loss.

I took a year out from paid work but I didn’t stop. We moved house, I also took on the Chair of a national charity and wrote a book. I then returned to work and ploughed on. Alongside this, becoming ‘THE BEST MUM I CAN POSSIBLY BE’ became my chief preoccupation. As any new parent will tell you, our radiant daughter brought a new type of light into our lives. It was initially, searing, so bright, I had to blink through the first year learning to adjust to the profound joy and then to the greying fear that arrived. Fear of loss, fear of repeated patterns, fear of not knowing what to do next. Learning how to live with this felt like picking glass splinters from my heart.

Madonna and Child with St Anne by Caravaggio (c1605-6)

Some seven years later, I sat still in a hospital bed watching the sun rise and fall through an oxygen mask. Pneumonia had pressed the pause button on my life. A close friend, shared a conversation with her husband that stopped me in my tracks; ‘your on the top of our list to go first because you’re living faster than anyone else’. In the year that has followed this I’ve stopped permanent work and started painting again. I’m learning to slow down, middle age is helping. I’m learning to look, to see darkness and dawn as an artist might. Noticing the line and shadow in the everyday and being able to distinguish what really matters and to teach this art to my daughter.

Photograph of an apple by Jimmy Wen

I wrote this poem to make sense of things.

Three Daughters

After you left us I waited,

Holding your hand until the silence

Holding my breath until

       the sun came up again and I could escape outside

Gulping the new morning air

And watching the circling gulls

       shrieking their songs of loss and longing, high above the hospital car park

I mostly remember your hands

How they put plasters on my grazes

Turned pages at bedtime

       stirred pots, brimming with love

These are my hands now

Life hardened palms

Stretching out to reach my daughter

       to teach her how to hold time

       and when to watch the sky.

Detail from "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" by Caravaggio (c1586)

The Mother Song, written and performed by Andrea Menard

Coal Dust and Women’s Work

Day 39 (Friday 8th January 2016)

39 percent of UK transport users would consider using a driverless car,
this number rose to 62% amongst young urban professionals, according to research conducted by
Transport Systems Catapult on behalf of the Department for Transport, the Department for Business
Innovation and Skills and Innovate UK.
Photo of Toyota Prius self-driving car Photo: EPA/GOOGLE

Today's blog is by Rachael Burnham, an excellent Learning and Development expert based in Manchester, with a particular interest in informal and blended learning. She has worked as a specialist consultant for over 14 years and is highly rated by her clients. She started her career working for a voluntary organisation preparing young people for leaving home and this gave her the opportunity to deliver training for the first time. She was good at it and enjoyed helping people grow, hence she started working in a more conventional staff development and training capacity. Rachael is active on social media, her Twitter handle is @BurnhamLandD and she writes a great blog: L&D Matters. Outside work she values spending time with her family and is a keen jazz fan, as well as having a passion for gardening.

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When the theme for this year’s Advent Blog was announced of ‘Comets and Coal Dust’, I was immediately drawn to that second part – Coal Dust – and transported back to my earliest childhood memories.

We lived in a terraced house in that part of Blackburn known as Wilpshire.  Our house was part of a little row along an un-made up road, which you went down to under a bridge.  Our house was somewhere in the middle of the row and behind the houses, at the end of the small gardens, was a path that ran along the back of the houses.   And the other side of that path was a stream, which I loved.  

Across the stream was a field in which cows were kept.  In those days, it was quite typical to leave a baby or small child out in a pram in the garden unattended and I remember looking at those cows with deep fascination and that they seemed to look right back at me!

Our house had coal fires. Just the phrase ‘coal dust’ brought to mind the sights, sounds and smells of those fires.  

My mother on her hands and knees bent down sweeping out the hearth, 

the grey, pinkish ash, 

the distinctive sounds of the coal tongs and poker knocking against the grate and slightly acrid smell of the coal.
  

To be honest I don’t really remember the sight of the fire lit with the flames – what I remember is the big brass fire guard which dominated the fire place – a sort of metallic cage 

and in front of this on the mat, in the warmth, I remember building wooden brick towers 

and playing with a pull-along elephant.  

I still have the elephant – he is made of chestnut coloured wood and is the most delicious rounded shape, with a very cheerful face – having survived two generations of Burnham’s play!

As a teenager, I remarked one time to my mother about how nice it would be to have a real fire again and was firmly brought back to reality by being reminded of how much work they involve.  Filling the coal bucket, sweeping out the hearth each morning, laying the fire, getting it to light and all that bending and being on your knees, 

in addition to having three children under four (by the time we moved to Blackpool) and all the other work that that involved.  ‘That’s why there is that phrase ‘A woman’s work is never done!’ ‘my mother would say.

When I became a parent myself and sometimes struggled with the care of my one child, I would think about how much easier I had things compared to my mother.  If I had been doing #3goodthings in those early years I would have frequently  tweeted 1) central heating 2) automatic washing machine 3) disposable nappies   ( ‘warm baby to snuggle, baby giggles and at sleep at last!’ would also have been popular choices).

About the time that this Advent Blog series was launched, we reached that point in the calender, 9 November, at which in Britain women are effectively working for free compared to men due to the gender pay gap.  This currently stands at a difference of 14.2%.  At the current rate of change it is estimated that it will take another 54 years for us to reach parity of pay – even over 40 years after the Equal Pay Act was introduced!

At the same time, Maternity Action were running a campaign drawing attention to the astounding fact that the number of women in the UK losing their job as a result of pregnancy discrimination had risen in the past decade from 30,000 in 2005 to a deeply shocking 54,000 in 2015.

Much of the workplace is still effectively sex segregated, with so many jobs primarily done by women or by men. Women are desperately under-represented in science, engineering and maths- related roles and over-dominate in education, health care and social care.  We miss out on women in science and in men in education and caring roles.  And there is the vertical sex segregation too – too few women in senior decision-making roles in organisations and in politics.

Then there is the continuing taboo around the menopause and work – it would be good to start talking about this.  And whilst access to work across the board for over 5Os is hard, there also seems to be an element of extra discrimination at play for women over 50.

I know that there is lots to tackle on other fronts too – disability discrimination, greater acknowledgement and acceptance of mental health issues in the workplace, a disturbing trend of increased race discrimination in the workplace and more.  But it does particularly feel like a ‘feminist’s work is never done’ at the moment.

The need for change doesn’t go away – it may seem to disappear from public view – but like a comet returns and galvanises us to action afresh.

A Challenging Year

Day 27 (Sunday 27th December 2015)

27 lunar mansions or nakshatras in the Hindu, Vedic and ancient Indian astrology.
In the West people follow their solar horoscopes, in India the Moon is of greater importance
each mansion is based on the 27.3 day period it takes the Moon to traverse all 12 signs of the zodiac.
Each nakshatra is 13°20’ wide. The series begins at 0 with Aries and runs counterclockwise as above.
The nakshatras are each sub-divided into 4, making 108 sections that are used for divination
(e.g.if your Moon is at 6°. your influence is Saturn). The mansion containing your Moon and its
planet are believed to influence your future, combined with the stars for that period.

Today I am delighted to introduce Helen Green, a talented blogger who is making her first appearance in the Advent Blog series this year. Helen has a powerful background in sales and marketing, working with some of the world's leading brands, where she showed a flair for insight. She has a degree in psychology, a masters in organisational change and is an accredited executive and business coach. She is based in London and runs her own company, Orient8, which she founded in 2011. She is active on social media (you can follow her on Twitter, her handle is @orient8you). As you can guess from the title, Helen's year could be described as "coal dust" - hard found, dirty and difficult, but there is a twist. She has been brave enough to share with us some very personal moments and I am sure we can all learn from her words.

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It’s been a challenging year.

As I look back on 2015, the standout features are all bad ones.

I was out for dinner recently with good friends and recounted the story of my year to them. One of my friends seemed a bit exasperated with me. She reminded me that I have so much that is good in my life and to be thankful for, despite the challenges.

Of course she was absolutely right.

My brain is Velcro for the bad stuff and Teflon for the good.

Dr Rick Hanson, neuropsychologist and meditation teacher says in his book “Buddha’s Brain - The practical neuroscience of happiness, wisdom and love” –

“we evolved to pay great attention to unpleasant experiences. This negativity bias overlooks good news, highlights bad news, and creates anxiety and pessimism.”

Mmmmm – sounds familiar!

So the chances are your brain is just like mine and you’ve had a challenging year too.

Or have you?

Just in case, I have an insight I would like to share with you.

In July this year, as I said goodbye to my Mum just before she went into surgery, not knowing if it was for the last time, I kissed her forehead, stroked her hair and wondered what on earth I might say. Although my body was screaming at me with pain and fear, stroking her hair had a calming effect and the words started to flow.

“In the end Mum, all there is, is love. I love you.”

Twice recently I have shared this story.

The first time was with a young woman who was really struggling. She has moved half way round the world to be with her love and was trying to work out how she could pursue both of her passions – her relationship with him and the beautiful work which she feels called to do.

We were on a workshop together and I recounted my story as she listened. Tears filled my eyes as I spoke – it is still so raw and powerful - and when I took a little pause I looked at her to discover tears in her eyes too. We let the moment just be, words not necessary as we connected at some deeper level.

Soon it was time for her to tell her story whilst I listened. She told me she had been moved by my story and was starting to notice that what had felt like a tortuous either/or situation, was no longer that way. Love is everything and her love for her boyfriend and for her work mean that however hard it may be to reconcile the two, she knows she can and will do it.

The second time I recounted my story was with a friend who is going through a tricky time in his relationship. After listening to him talk for some time, I told him of my experience.

I said “in the end all there is, is love. Everything else is just stuff. You love each other - don’t let the love go.” 

I was crying again though more softly and in less pain than at my Mum’s bedside.

His response? A silence, followed by a rather breathless “wow, that’s a powerful insight. I just want to hug you.” This was not possible as we were talking on the phone at that moment, but I felt his love - that of a true friend - for me. I know too that he is in some small way changed by that conversation, that connection.

Mother Theresa said;

“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”

And as my favourite philosopher (!) Audrey Hepburn once said;

“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.”

At this holiday time of year when we get to spend more time with our loved ones, let’s hold onto each other, love (and be loved) until it hurts.

After all, in the end, all there is, is LOVE.

I was mistaken – it’s been a wonderful year.

"All You Need is Love"played live at Buckingham Palace 

by Paul McCartney, Joe Cocker, Eric Clapton and Rod Stewart, 2002