Too much travel!

There was a time when my job demanded air travel on Sunday and Friday every week. I would travel to the client’s site on Sunday, drive up to an hour further upon arrival at the airport, and reverse the process on Friday. My social life came to a screeching halt. I barely got groceries purchased, drycleaning exchanged, and hair cutting accomplished over the weekends at home.

Since November my husband and I, or just I, have been traveling at least twice a month. It is April. I’ve just returned from my second cross country trip since the beginning of March, and I’ll travel half-way across the country from the west coast to Chicago in 10 days. I’m tired and my husband has gotten a wicked cold.

Some of this travel has been for pleasure–family weddings and birthdays, a wonderful trip to Egypt in January–and some for work, my work as adjunct faculty at an online university. All of it is stressful, particularly since the advent of long security lines, the necessity to disrobe and rerobe at the beginning and end of these lines, planes with less and less leg room (I’m 5’9″ and my husband is 6′), connections that are scheduled too close for us over 60s to run from one gate or one terminal to another in 20 minutes, and other hassles related to air travel. We put on our virtual patience helmets when we leave the house and try to leave them on throughout our trips.

Last weekend, on our trip to the Washington DC area, I could feel my patience unraveling as we sat in freeway traffic at the end of a very long day. I could also feel my body rebel against the stress of the kind of life we’ve been leading over the last 5 months. My neck is seriously stiff. My shoulders are hunched close to my ears. My wrist is screaming due to both lugging bags too far and already suffering from carpel tunnel. My good eating habits go all to hell when I’m tired. And exercise? Other than walking along endless gateways and getting in and out of cars, forget it. When I get where I’m going, I just want to go to sleep.

I don’t imagine this is any easier for 30-somethings. I do imagine that the diminished physical capability of us over 60s makes this kind of activity even more stressful than for younger people. It is my choice to do what I am doing and I look forward to NOT doing it as of the end of this month.

I gotta share this

I’ve been scanning the internet for a store that sells unusual, stylish clothes for older women. I want professional clothes as well as casual clothes. I don’t want arty bag dresses with five layers or sequined jackets from Chico’s. I want real chic. I found just what I was looking for thanks to Sunday’s New York Times Style section (my first go-to section when I wake up Sunday morning). The store is a website and it isn’t selling anything, just telling about chic older mostly New Yorkers who are interviewed and photographed by Ari Seth Cohen. Go there and see handsome men in orange jackets, gorgeous gray-haired women in greige fitted jackets, and just fabulous looking over 60s. The site http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/ is worth a daily visit.

A view of graying

I notice really stunning looking women with gray hair. I especially notice the ones with geometric cheek bones and salt and pepper short, sleek styles. I’m jealous. I’d like to wear my hair that way too. It says to me, “I love the way I look and to hell with all of the stereotypes that say I should look any different.”

I went gray about three years ago. I don’t have that wonderful strong wire-like hair it takes to pull off the red lipstick, sleek short hair look. Mine is baby fine and white in the front with a brown underlayer in the back. In order to keep peace at home, my hair is longer than I’d choose to wear it, but not long by any measurement. It covers my ears and mostly covers them in curls (completely chemically induced, as my hair is straight as a ruler). I get many compliments. A striking woman at one of my workshops said she only needed my example to have the courage to go from electric purple red to gray.

My best friend who is somewhat younger than I warned me that I would be perceived differently in professional environments and that I might not like how I was treated. Since I do at least a third of my professional work with her company, that hasn’t been a problem. The remaining 2/3 of my work is online so I can choose to be seen or not (by my computer camera).

I don’t want to be younger. I don’t even want to look younger. I do want to be considered beautiful until the day I die. For me, gray hair is part of my age-appropriate beauty, and part of the beauty I admire in others like Helen Mirren at right.

The good news about working old

I have been meeting with a SCORE client of my husband’s. This unusually capable and handsome man (doesn’t hurt to look, right?) is building a database to track organizational change processes. Since I’ve spent most of my adulthood leading, participating in, and crafting solutions for organizational change, my husband thought I could be more helpful to Steve than he could be.

It turns out I can be helpful. I can tell Steve what hasn’t or doesn’t work when planning, introducing, implementing, and tracking organizational change. I can tell him because I’ve done all of these things–just not as well as I think they should be done. Making change is hard for any person. Multiply that by 10 to 10,000 and you have some idea how hard it is for organizations. But the more important challenge for both individuals and organizations is making sure change is happening and then making it stick. Virtually no corporation does this well. The military does it much better.

I can’t tell Steve how to build a database. God no. I can tell Steve what needs to be built into a database that purports to help organizational change agents build and track a change process. Years of experience and some wisdom about change, my own personal change and changes I’ve led in organizations, help me to be helpful to others with more enthusiasm than experience.

Belt and suspenders

Yesterday I did my third in a series of five teleclasses about Appreciative Coaching. A friend and colleague put me onto vyew.com as a way to do webinars. Using this site with its free conference line has worked just fine until I had international participants. Static from the international connection in our second session made it impossible to hear each other. I went in search of a better option.

I assumed, as I have on each step of my learning journey about technology, that there was a neat solution–simple, elegant, obvious–but one I didn’t yet know about. I spent a week looking at free and fee-based conferencing sites on the internet. I talked to salespeople and customer service representatives. After a week of searching, a wonderful down-to-earth woman at the site I’m now using told me that there is no perfect solution to conferencing with international participants. Yesterday we used both the vyew.com site and a fee-based conferencing site (connection via internet and telephone conference line). The sound quality was much better and the connecting information was more complicated. In fact, I used the wrong number to connect initially!

Ultimately, the sound quality was much better. I suspect that some of this was true because my Peruvian colleagues were on mute for the entire hour. So, one more challenge of working into one’s older age. I assume that younger people know the solution to everything I have yet to discover. In a way it is a relief to know that that isn’t always true. In another way, I feel more mystified as to what I should know (about technology, mostly) and what isn’t yet known.