Ramblemuse Touch Points

At just over two weeks since my lay-off from LLNL, the lab is already starting to seem a memory seen through the aerosol-induced haze of distance. By focusing and working intensely on other endeavors, such as networking () and the general bibliography, I’ve deliberately accelerated my own psychological perception of the passing of time. Simply because my current rate of endeavor isn’t sustainable over the longer haul, it changes my normal perception of events occurring and thus of time itself. Yesterday, my membership card for the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) arrived, providing another new door to walk through.

Yet, in running into former colleagues, some laid off and some still at LLNL, a further reflection has emerged. Quite obviously, with 500 flex/term employees laid-off earlier and another 100 coming in June, LLNL is balancing its budget partly at the expense of eating its current “seed corn”. At least some of these flex/term employees were positioned to become part of the next generation of career employees. It’s hard to project the long term losses to scientific capabilities, but they will likely be far from insignificant.

If seed corn is the genesis of productive output, legumes are often part of the almost untraceable infrastructure. In agriculture, legumes have a unique ability to fix nitrogen, being used as a fallow crop to make the soil more productive for a subsequent primary crop. In looking around me at the “transition center”, in talking with people, I realized that LLNL also has razed many of its “legumes”, scientists with substantial background and experience whose efforts in aiding colleagues are often untraceable in terms of specific accounts and short-term implementations. In effect, LLNL has removed a significant number of informal, internal consultants; those who save others from making old mistakes or from having to reinvent the wheel.

Working for deeper understanding of the systems they work with, “legumes” take the risk of lowering their own short-term, measurable productivity. In return, they are able to answer colleagues’ questions from this phase-space of deeper understanding. In a commencement address, John Seeley Brown talked about the value of such mentors and the intellectual capital of the dialog they bring. Color them gone. I am reminded of the origin of the symbol for zero; the mark in the sand indicating the void where a counting stone has been removed (Miranda Lundy, Sacred Number: The Secret Qualities of Quantities).

Finally, a poem I recently ran across capturing well the paradox of transition and the uncertainty it brings, yet also that the same uncertainty brings the potential for new opportunity, growth, and knowledge.

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door

Adrienne Rich (Prospective Immigrants Please Note, 1962)