Time travel back to my twenties (field notes)

E88: Reflections from London, Friends & Family IRL 5 - LHR to YYZ

May 19, 2023

This week’s edition comes to you live from London. Well almost. By the time it's published, I will be winging my way back across the Atlantic, ready to read your comments in Canada. (A lot of un-planned alliteration!) Next week, Boston if you are up for a meetup.

London WoP IRL meetup: L-R Eric Ho, Charlotte Crowther, Melissa Menke - all tall

This week’s edition.

Time travel back to my twenties: London is the town where I am still twenty, still someone’s daughter, someone’s eldest sister. Taking a walk back memory lane.
WoP IRL meetup in London

IRL - nothing compares to it

Really nothing as special as live human contact! There is a human-ness to us, a visceral transfer of happiness neurons in smiles, a physical feeling of support. We reveal the 98% of ourselves that did not fit into that 2x2 inch square on a 40-minute Zoom call.

Virtual meetings are great, and seeing the faces of those you’ve come to respect and love on screen is step in the right direction for those of us who grew up separated by distance, happy for those once-a-week static filled phone calls, or the recognizable swirls on a handwritten letter in our mailbox.

I first met these Write of Passage friends in Zoom breakout rooms. Now we shared hugs and a meal:

Melissa Menke

writes

The Vital Neighborhood

writes

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Where? Exmouth market in the Farringdon area of London (between the British Museum and Sadler’s Wells Theatre). It’s been a long time since my maroon heeled suede boots rat-a-tatted these streets.

Shining a light on how these young vital minds enjoy my city was a real treat. Understanding how they bring the wide world into their work, and take their work to the wide world was another.

Shining a light. Photo credit: Eric Ho. Smiles credit: Eric, Charlotte, Melissa, Moi

Geeta Dhir is a new acquaintance, creating a fabulous initiative Futuregazing - to teach our young adults the tools of futures thinking. Aside from helping with the students, I hope to help support parents who are busy supporting their teen. We could have done it via zoom, but this was definitely funner.

Time travelling back to my twenties

I’m in my hometown, London. It is where my family unit has been based since the late 1970s.

Yes. I am lucky. I have other “hometowns” too. Kampala - where I was born, and I remember the sun and the soil. Saligao - a little village tucked away between the hills and the golden sands in Goa, land of my ancestors. Manhattan - MY home city, where I grew up as a professional and an individual. Oradell and Oakville - where we have raised our family for the past decades.

But London is where I finished my schooling and started work. The phase of life that my own children are now experiencing.

So being home this week, the week of Mother’s Day, with my own mother, has given me extra insights:

We are always young in someone’s eyes

Here, in London, I am still my mother’s child.

I’ve been fielding an unenviable head cold since landing in London. Hayfever revisited.

Each morning, she asks how I am feeling, forces me to do inhalation, plies me with hot drinks specially made, gets my sister to create her (delicious) homebrew concoctions to soothe my scratchy throat. Each evening, she comes by, rubs ointments on my throat and forehead and blesses me before I sleep. I may be here to help look after her, but she still sees me as her little girl.

It is good to know that in her eyes, I have not aged.

“Twenty year olds would rather listen to someone else”

I’m grateful to catch up with my friend Lynn.

Sahil Bloom and others talk about “Increasing your surface luck area.” Lynn was my first experience with this form of serendipity.

We both started work on the same day. It was my first job, and Lynn had returned to the UK after a few years working in South Africa. She became my informal mentor - way before that function existed in corporate speak. “I really appreciated your coaching, Lynn,” I tell her, “particularly in my first months of learning to navigate corporate life. My daughter spent the first two years of her professional life working from home. Alone.”

We’d have lunch together each month. Lynn would coach me on how to transition from student to corporate life - how to navigate a grumpy teammate, how to dress, an intro into decision trees and mental models. I learned that I should “recce” the market instead of making impulse buys; that I should check my money and time budget before rushing to share a flat with a co-worker.

She has a permanent seat on my personal Board of Directors and status as Aunt Lynn to every member of our family. I went to Lynn for advice when I was considering a year’s contract in Manhattan a year after I started work and when I decided to marry.

We were chatting about my youngest graduating next week. I’m grateful that he is creating his own Board of Directors to advise him. “But don’t you remember? Your parents kept offering suggestions. But you chose to get your advice elsewhere!”

Everyone should have a Lynn in their life. Aside from being a font of knowledge on everything from hiking tips to local plants, she reminds me that once upon a time, aged twenty-two, I behaved exactly the same way!

Who was I in my twenties?

Sleeping in my mother’s home, I lay my head down on the primary colour Marimekko pillowcases, and snuggle under the same sheets I’d bought in John Lewis with my second paycheck. They were all the rage at that time.

It takes me back to my hopes and dreams and imaginations as a twenty-something year old. What was I like? What were my dreams? It is really handy to be meeting up with friends who have known the teen me. Apparently, I steadfastedly ignored all the accumulated wisdom of my own parents, because I was “modern, and knew better”. My world was full of I’m Possibles!

“You DO know better. Given what you do, you know better than most,” I got chastised more than once this week, “So don’t fall into the trap of parenting as if you are still in the industrial era. Your kids will be OK. Trust.”

Everyone should go back to the places where their wrinkles and responsibilities fall away, and they are twenty once again.

At this moment in my own life journey, it has been good to go back and remember that, like butterflies, we each need to live our own lives, embrace our own life journey and grow into our own brand of wisdom.