Being Thrown into the Woosh

My sister, like most college students, took an abnormal psychology class to cover some requirement. Luckily, she did not use this class as license to start analyzing me, but she did share a story about a schizophrenic who talked about something called "the woosh".

I'm paraphrasing here, but I believe the story went something like, the guy was in group therapy and began describing "the woosh".

"Somedays," he said, "you wake up and step right into the woosh, and just go wherever it takes you. Other days you can't get in the woosh, and it just goes right by you."

All the other patients in the group seemed to understand exactly what he was talking about.  And since then, my sister references "the woosh" frequently.

My sister has lived most of her life in "the woosh", and probably will continue to, and I'm sure we all know people like that.

I, on the other hand, don't often find my self in "the woosh", except occasionally during scheduled unstructured amounts of time, and even then, I suspect that setting aside time to be in "the woosh", defeats the purpose of "the woosh" entirely.

Girls like me, need more often, to be thrown into "the woosh".

Which happened a couple of weeks ago, during a trip with the Thread team to Haiti, when hurricane Irene shut down JFK, and canceled my flight home.

After a lot of pleading, batting of my eye lashes, and a first class upgrade, I had a new flight, and 4 extra days in Haiti.  4 days, of unplanned time, 4 days out of the office, and 4 days away from the phone/internet.



Hey woosh, sup?



And you know what?

I was challenged. At first. But then I gave in and learned, and discussed, and read. Reflected, rescheduled, shared, connected, played games, danced, sang, and generally had a great time hanging out in "the woosh".

Sometimes it takes being thrown off of your scheduled path, to be assured of what direction you should be going in.