Week 65
View from the houseboats
It’s been a gorgeous few days here in Sausalito. I’ve accidentally taken a month off from writing these. It’s been a time of tremendous change. I took a week vacation off-grid, 4 days completely solo at Wilbur Hot Springs. We’ve had visitors, we’ve gotten together with people, we’ve been delighted and overwhelmed in turn.
It’s a season of transitions, which means the emotions are tightly layered. I’m doing my best to ignore what I think I should feel and honor what I do feel. Trying to attend to what is working for me and the family in the hopes of retaining more of that in the coming months.
In work transitions, I’ve been prepping for multiple student-collaborator-interns joining my team for 8-10 weeks this summer. Today was also graduation for our Geriatrics-affiliated fellows and postdocs. I was completely touched and honored to be given an award for my research mentoring of the Geri/Pal fellow this year. I’m so grateful the fellow wrote down what she said because it was a classic academic pandemic parenting moment. Theo was overtired, overexcited, and cutely distracting me such that I heard little of what was said and no presence of mind to say anything in return or remember what I was supposed to do in that moment.
Perhaps I might have said that every mentoring relationship is a two-way gift. Sometimes I learn from the clinical expertise of my mentee-collaborators. Or a chance to work with them to do something I could never do alone. Sometimes I get a chance to remember how much I’ve learned and how far I’ve come, recalling how hard and confusing it all was when I started, and realizing I can help others navigate the inevitable eddies and waves and rough stretches that are part of any project or career.
If I take a moment to reflect on my internal state, it’s clear that I really love this kind of teaching and mentoring. I’ve been spending more time than is reasonable (e.g. it’s unpaid and I’m stealing it from my own research time) thinking about how to make research and qualitative analysis approachable for my team of summer students. I’m voting with my feet. I’m thinking about how I model bringing my whole person to my work, sharing the many failures and persistence that are represented in the white space of the official bios.
I’ve also been using the work of this year+ of letters as a model for the summer lab. I’m starting daily lab meetings with wellness or gratitude checks. I’ve got them reporting daily goals, and my 3 goals are around whole-self-care, first-author research, and for service. I’m trying to get them teaching, and relying on, each other.
I’m not sure how these missives will evolve this summer. There may be more random one-focus posts, less frequent and more unstructured pandemic letters. Appropriate, as we all stutter our way into this vaccinated next stage of the pandemic.
Here’s hoping you and yours are well.
Krista