"Reachback"

by Diane

Eric Berne, founder of transactional analysis and generally interesting person (and a serious user of the Stith Thompson Motif Index and expert on fairy tales, but that’s another story entirely…) coined the term “reachback” and defined it (I paraphrase here) as the ability an upcoming trip has to upset or disarrange the conduct of your everyday life before you actually leave; and also as the period during which that upset/disarrangement lasts.

It’s an easy thing to miss, or to gloss over, until you have your attention drawn to it as a phenomenon in its own right. (I may talk a little about its companion phenomenon, “afterburn”, when I get home…if I have the energy.) But it’s worst when you try to cram too much preparation for a trip into too small a space. Fortunately this trip hasn’t been one where that happens.

This week has been about getting Ryoh-Ohki II (the Sharp Actius, successor to the Sharp Mebius “Ryoh-Ohki”) into shape to go abroad for a couple of weeks. This means duplicating all the e-mail and other “daily changed” files in Calanda, my big desk machine*: making sure all PDA and organizer entries are duplicated in both machines: making sure that the laptop can talk to the mobile phone as usual: making sure that the digital recorder is talking properly to the dictation/transcription software: making sure that everyone who needs to know where I am knows how to find me if they need me; making sure that the laptop has all the applications installed that need to be there to carry on daily maintenance on various aspects of the websites; etc, etc, etc…

Reachback: this is it. (sigh) …Work? This week? I don’t think so. …And then there’s the laundry.

Argh…

*Calanda is the name of a mountain north of Chur, in Switzerland; the peak is reputed to be haunted, and there are supposed to be caves underneath it in which local heroes lie sleeping, waiting to awaken in the time of their canton’s greatest need, as in the ever-popular archetype. (However, whatever caves there may be under Calanda are much more likely occupied by the Swiss Army.) …It’s also the name of a very nice beer brewed by a Swiss brewer in the area…though the Haldengut brewery seems to have been eaten by Heineken. (mutter)

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