Finnish Midsummer and Australian song lines

Can life be normal without being repetitive?
Laura is painting stairs leading to the attic and I´m painting laths. Talking about normal life means picking up exceptional events occured lately. The exception Laura has lately experienced is meeting a gourmet cook. Normally the regular staff of various restaurants where she occasionally goes to work weekend rush hours does not react to the newcomer. This cook does. First he brought her strawberry cake. Next he surprised her with delicious pizza slices. Now he is included in our conversation about repetition and normal life.

"In fact, you could arrange a garden party and he could come and prepare a gourmet meal." Laura suggests. "Oh, yes. You could invite your friends. Tobias would invite his. And then we would invite Seela´s and Samuli´s friends. It´s an excellent idea." I rejoice.

"And what would happen then? What would be normal?" Laura continues. "After the party Tobias would go to Doris and write about that. You would carry all the dishes into the kitchen and say ´Huhhuh. Now I will have a good night´s sleep.´ And that would be normal life in Finland as well."

I admire Laura´s intelligence and her sense of humour. I wish my normal life will offer me friendships like the one between us in the future as well.

We Finns exist for being able to experience the Midsummer. It is Sunday now. There have been no buses since Friday afternoon at two o´clock. All neighbours have gone to the country. Houses are empty. It is quiet. Everything being exceptionally quiet you feel strange when having the feeling that someone is staring at you - espeally if you have just come out of shower. Checking the situation I saw something dark behind the window. My eyes met the eyes of a big, soft-hairy cat. The cat didn´t mind. I was worried that Uffe might smell the visitor and get beaten. Nothing happened. Uffe is no more actively looking for excitement or adventures. If he faces some, his breathing starts hissing. Which do you prefer - normal life and normal breathing or excitement and gasping for breath? It´s your choice.

Today the staring-cat story started opening up. In the morning I was woken up by a magpie family chatting loudly in the garden. Having finally in the afternoon cut all the branches of apple trees lying on the ground in the garden I could mow the lawn. I found that at least one teenage member of the magpie family had been caught by that tranquil and satisfied looking cat. Maybe I heard their funeral ceremonies in the morning. Or maybe, it was a parental lecture on the importance of paying heed to personal safety.

At Midsummer two dozen Finns get killed on roads, lakes and fights. As there are only 5,276,955 of us (31.12.2006) that is too many, especially because we want to take care of everybody. In the old days, before contraception, the Midsummer loss of population did not matter that much. It was automatically replaced by new baby Finns nine months later.

In this country we know by the experience of thousands of years that the power of the light Midsummer night magic easily beats the magic power of dark nights. That is why we love the days getting longer and longer since Christmas. We are continuously looking forward to the magic summer nights.

The quickest and most efficient way to change your life is to get married as many Finnish couples do at Midsummer. However, I have contented myself with less radical methods. One of them is reading. I just finished Nice Girls Don´t Get the Corner Office, Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers by Lois P. Frankel (Warner Business Books, 2004). What have I learnt? To be successful in business I should start playing chess. It teaches strategic thinking.

Successful men and women regard business and corporate life as a game. Less successful women regard it as an event - going to a concert or a theatre.

To my disappointment I´m much more more familiar with going to a concert than with playing any games. In my family it never occured to anybody that children should learn toplay chess. Chess was for my father only. Neither did we learn to play cards, because playing cards results in rows and fighting. Good bye success in business life!

Perhaps I had better start reading a new book. The next choice is Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. "The book offers concrete suggestions for how to turn negative thinking into positive results."

Have you ever thought about thinking? It would be very interesting to know what happens on the other side of thinking, just before a thought enters your mind. Maybe you have experienced something that refers to the pre-existence of thoughts. Sometimes you get concrete evidence of it.

Perhaps the invisible song lines that in the Australian desserts connect people to each other form a global network. But who activates the connection? Is it the person who came into my mind two minutes ago? Or is it me? Who thought of those pizza slices first - Laura or the gourmet cook? Who had the initiative - me thinking about Anneli and her email address? Or Anneli who called me two minutes after I had thought of her?

Is it so that thinking of anybody activates that particular song line or opens the channel - and that offers us a concrete opportunity to bless that person? Maybe that activation is part of normal life. Perhaps that can be done in the same way we go to concerts. Maybe we could also make conscious plans to activate the song lines we happen to cross, in which case we make use of strategic thinking. Gourmet cooks are good at strategic thinking. Strategy becomes useful only after you know what you are aiming at.