No, not you. Me.
Yes, I feel like I’ve been gone, in some ways. Not from my blog (although there’s some truth to that too), but from my spiritual side.
Here’s the catalyst:
This reminded me of how small I am, and yet how much each moment, each movement, each word can change the course of my world and affect those around me. Each drop of water is lost in the tide, and yet each drop of water makes a difference.
I feel like I’ve been somewhat lost from all of this, caught up in the details and the logistics and the sometimes-overwhelmingness of life and career. A few minutes on the beach, watching and listening to the tide, brought me back.
Welcome back, me.
I have been blessed to have had the opportunity to know and love Diana as a daughter-in-law, mother to her grandchildren, friend and colleague.
A wee story…
When I visited my mother in late November, only a couple of months ago, I was very apprehensive about what I could say to her. Despite the enormous support provided by Steven and Debbie and their kids, she seemed to have given up.
The start to her life gave reason for her to feel unsafe. Her mother was loving but more than a bit crazy, and her father suffered from depression and committed suicide by jumping off a bridge when she was a teenager. I think she had to take some responsibility for her mother and for her younger sister Madge before and after her father’s death. Later, she married two men both of whom proved to be unfaithful, and her two sons moved far away, especially me to Australia.
So she didn’t know how much she made a difference: When Steven and I were growing up, I knew that she would give her right arm for us, and this always seemed critically important to me, even as a kid. She was just absolutely there for us, and we knew it. Her heart was huge, even though her culinary skills never rose above “if it’s Tuesday it must be meat loaf”. She had to put up with two challenging sons that often scrapped with each other, lit firecrackers in our apartment building, dropped baggies filled with water onto people from our third floor window, and generated threats from the landlord. She probably dreaded parent-teacher meetings. Nonetheless, we always knew she was proud of us, even when we would have sorely sorely tested any parent’s patience.
She mattered: Her fun things were making and giving pottery, and making cards for people. Simple things that she enjoyed, and were part of her giving to the people she cared about. Even after her death, Steven and I gave a plate of hers to a friend and neighbor of hers at Renaissance, and the woman became tearful with gratitude.
Let’s consider what they might have been thinking and what that implies for the members of a project team. We have to begin with the context that a certain amount of the Manifesto’s authors’ drivers were reactions to the classic/traditional Waterfall approach in which as much work as possible is done up front: requirements, system design, database design, visual design, detailed functional design, test plans, project plan and Gantt charts…
Nope.
