"Comprendí, en fin, que las cosas sucedían al mismo tiempo a un lado y otro de la vida, pero que no todo el mundo tenía el privilegio de darse cuenta de ello, así que sentí una enorme gratitud por haber amanecido aquel día con esa ventaja respecto a los demás."
It´s Christmas Eve tomorrow. Mañana tenemos la Nochebuena. Ahora mismo nosotros los finlandeses estámos haciendo las cosas normales de la Navidad. Escribir algo en el Internet no está incluida en lo normal en éste momento especial. Lo normal es cocinar, preparar los últimos regalos, limpiar la casa, llevar el árbol de navidad en la casa. Lo normal es que la casa huela a la navidad - de jengibre, jamón al horno y de detergentes. En raelidad todavía me falta lavar el suelo de mi dormitorio. Hay que hacerlo antes de poder sentirme contenta y feliz. La normalidad te sienta contenta, ?verdad? - Aquí tienes una descripción oficial de la normalidad navideña nuestra .
Viendo lo que has visto, puedes ser convencido que las amas de la casa quienes lo han hecho todo respetando todas las reglas de la normalidad navideñ finlandesa, ya están al borde de un ataque de nervios.
Hay tantas cosas para arreglar y mañana a la una ya va a parar la vida normal en todo el país - se cierran todas las tiendas, restaurantes y fábricas de papel. Los autobuses no circulan. Antes pararon los trenes también, pero hoy en día ya no más. El único que trabaja y viaja es el Santa Claus.
Sana´ta deja sus talleres y almacenes en Laponia finlandesa y visita todas las familias del mundo. Tiene mucha prisa. Cunado llega lo primero que pregunta es si nos hemos comportado bien. Es una cuestión que tiene dos respuestas alternativas - o te has comportado bien o no lo has hecho. Y si no te has comportado bien, arriesgas perder todos tus regalos - por eso ahora me voy para lavar el suelo de mi dormitorio. Hay que respetar la normalidad.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
A Two-second Life-organizer
They say that your brain knew two seconds ago what you will be doing just now.
At exactly this moment your brain knows what you will be doing in two seconds from now.
I´m sorry to have to confess that I have no idea who those ´they´ are who say so. I would like to have some further information about the topic. But anyway, isn´t it comforting to know that somebody knows what you´ll be doing, even though you yourself do not?
All human beings are fallible and make errors. Sometimes we admit it, but there are also times when we hide it. Today I have all reasons to think that there is a human element also in that two-second system of pre-knowing.
In the morning I started prepairing a seminar. My point in the seminar is that small things and incidents that bring us joy in life, will also result in innovations. It is just the opposite to what Proust says. He is of the opinion that pain and suffering are the only real highways to learning.
Maybe Proust is more right than I am. However, recently we have had so many sad events taking place here in Finland that I decided to put Proust aside. What we need in our normal life just at present is hope - simple, authentic, every-day hope.
How do I explain my decision? It has become obvious that some of the consequences of the economic depression of the 1990´s appear with the delay of about 15 years. Children of those days experienced their parent´s pain. They are now young adults. Having one shooting incident in a school is one incident too much. We have had two of them. They are absolute exceptions, but very alarming.
Teenagers of those days are now adults. They may have insecure jobs and debt in the same way their parents and neighbours had when the banks collapsed and jobs disappeared in the beginning of the 1990´s. Those memories are far from being encouraging in the present economic situation of the world. Our suicide ratio has always been high, but current extended suicides are frightening.
What you see in your mind´s eye in the future determines what you do now, what you can cope with, and what you are able to plan for your life in the coming years. You might be unable to dream of anything magnificent for your future just at present. Anyway, you may still be able to recognize small things and events in your life that you have all reasons to be happy about and grateful for. Luckily Proust is not the only choice.
Instead of Proust I pick up Roger-Pol Droit from my bookshelf (Esineiden luonto, ISBN: 951-31-3046-0, original title: Derniéres nouvelles des choses. Une expérience philosphique).
Meeting fresh ideas equals experiences of joy. To my mind it is nice to know that there are two kinds of objects. There are objects you can put into a wheelbarrow and others you cannot. In other words, there are objects that you can touch and other objects you can reach only by means of thinking. Those reachable only by thinking can be subgrouped into ones comparable with the reflection of the moon on the surface of the sea and the other ones existing only as ideas.
On the empty pages in the beginning of the book I have collected some intereresting words: ´objects reachable by thought´, ´objects unreachable by thought´, ´part time objects´, ´dense objects´, ´transitional objects´, ´a bladeless knife without a handle´, ´an educated violin´etc.
People have different sources of pleasure. Roger-Pol Droit reframes jewelry as ´skin objects´. He says that we should be able to drill our head from inside out. He also says that a ticket is a sign of business and it only functions in business context. Learning to know all that brings me joy. To my mind the greatest blessing we have is other people´s creativity and intelligence.
Some time ago I went to check the Spanish shelf in the library again. Being in a hurry I just checked if there were any books by Juan José Millás. There was one - Laura y Julio (ISBN-13:978-84-322-1228-4). Starting to read it I realized that I knew the book. That was no reason to put ot aside. Second reading was equally enjoyable.
I didn´t remember - for example - that there are people whose essence is in the ideas they have. That is why they dress, in a way, in the direction inside out. When dressing up they cover their ideas layer by layer by clothes, make-up and hair-do.
Other people dress in the direction outside in. They, in a way, construct themselves by decorating themselves. Their primary message is in their appearence. They use their clothes, hair-do etc to tell us who they are and what they are worth for.
It´s two weeks since I read the book which makes it possible that my description is a very rough approximation of what Millás really says. Fortunately we in this case have the source available.
"Nunca se le había ocurrido que las ideas estuvieran por encima de las personas, pero quizá fuera cierto, puesto que eran los ideas, no las personas, las que movían el mundo. A diferencia de su vecino, Julio se movía en el terreno de las personas, de las cosas concretas, porque no tenía capacidad para elevarse al mundo de las representaciones. Ordenaba los objetos, mantenía limpia la cocina o el cuarto de baño, porque carecía de un mundo imaginario al que prestar aquellos cuidados."
According to Droit - and my own experience - this world is operated by objects. According to Millás and social constructionism it is operated by ideologies which are packets of certain ideas and thoughts. - If you think that objects are part of various ideologies, you might be right as well.
If you want to read some more about ideologies it is worth reading An Introduction to Social Constructionism by Vivien Burr (ISBN: 0-415-10405-X).
As to the human aspect of our two-seconds pre-knowlwdge system, you had better mark all business and other appointments in your agenda. I was wandering among ´part time objects´ and ´transitional objects´, when somebody called me. She was wondering if I was going to arrive in a meeting or not.
Tickets are a mark of business and so are credit cards. Taxis are nice. You need not open and close the garage door before leaving. Neither need you find any parking place when arriving.
On the back seat you can quickly check what the topic of the meeting is. You can collect your ideas. Yoy can plan how to turn the meeting into business profiting you and all other partners as well as their networks. In other words, you have time enough to make sure that your two-second organizer of life is synchronised with your short- and long-term goals - and that they are in harmony with your dreams.
I have a ticket and hotel reservation in Madrid in a couple of weeks´ time. That is part of my twenty-year dream becoming true little by little.
At exactly this moment your brain knows what you will be doing in two seconds from now.
I´m sorry to have to confess that I have no idea who those ´they´ are who say so. I would like to have some further information about the topic. But anyway, isn´t it comforting to know that somebody knows what you´ll be doing, even though you yourself do not?
All human beings are fallible and make errors. Sometimes we admit it, but there are also times when we hide it. Today I have all reasons to think that there is a human element also in that two-second system of pre-knowing.
In the morning I started prepairing a seminar. My point in the seminar is that small things and incidents that bring us joy in life, will also result in innovations. It is just the opposite to what Proust says. He is of the opinion that pain and suffering are the only real highways to learning.
Maybe Proust is more right than I am. However, recently we have had so many sad events taking place here in Finland that I decided to put Proust aside. What we need in our normal life just at present is hope - simple, authentic, every-day hope.
How do I explain my decision? It has become obvious that some of the consequences of the economic depression of the 1990´s appear with the delay of about 15 years. Children of those days experienced their parent´s pain. They are now young adults. Having one shooting incident in a school is one incident too much. We have had two of them. They are absolute exceptions, but very alarming.
Teenagers of those days are now adults. They may have insecure jobs and debt in the same way their parents and neighbours had when the banks collapsed and jobs disappeared in the beginning of the 1990´s. Those memories are far from being encouraging in the present economic situation of the world. Our suicide ratio has always been high, but current extended suicides are frightening.
What you see in your mind´s eye in the future determines what you do now, what you can cope with, and what you are able to plan for your life in the coming years. You might be unable to dream of anything magnificent for your future just at present. Anyway, you may still be able to recognize small things and events in your life that you have all reasons to be happy about and grateful for. Luckily Proust is not the only choice.
Instead of Proust I pick up Roger-Pol Droit from my bookshelf (Esineiden luonto, ISBN: 951-31-3046-0, original title: Derniéres nouvelles des choses. Une expérience philosphique).
Meeting fresh ideas equals experiences of joy. To my mind it is nice to know that there are two kinds of objects. There are objects you can put into a wheelbarrow and others you cannot. In other words, there are objects that you can touch and other objects you can reach only by means of thinking. Those reachable only by thinking can be subgrouped into ones comparable with the reflection of the moon on the surface of the sea and the other ones existing only as ideas.
On the empty pages in the beginning of the book I have collected some intereresting words: ´objects reachable by thought´, ´objects unreachable by thought´, ´part time objects´, ´dense objects´, ´transitional objects´, ´a bladeless knife without a handle´, ´an educated violin´etc.
People have different sources of pleasure. Roger-Pol Droit reframes jewelry as ´skin objects´. He says that we should be able to drill our head from inside out. He also says that a ticket is a sign of business and it only functions in business context. Learning to know all that brings me joy. To my mind the greatest blessing we have is other people´s creativity and intelligence.
Some time ago I went to check the Spanish shelf in the library again. Being in a hurry I just checked if there were any books by Juan José Millás. There was one - Laura y Julio (ISBN-13:978-84-322-1228-4). Starting to read it I realized that I knew the book. That was no reason to put ot aside. Second reading was equally enjoyable.
I didn´t remember - for example - that there are people whose essence is in the ideas they have. That is why they dress, in a way, in the direction inside out. When dressing up they cover their ideas layer by layer by clothes, make-up and hair-do.
Other people dress in the direction outside in. They, in a way, construct themselves by decorating themselves. Their primary message is in their appearence. They use their clothes, hair-do etc to tell us who they are and what they are worth for.
It´s two weeks since I read the book which makes it possible that my description is a very rough approximation of what Millás really says. Fortunately we in this case have the source available.
"Nunca se le había ocurrido que las ideas estuvieran por encima de las personas, pero quizá fuera cierto, puesto que eran los ideas, no las personas, las que movían el mundo. A diferencia de su vecino, Julio se movía en el terreno de las personas, de las cosas concretas, porque no tenía capacidad para elevarse al mundo de las representaciones. Ordenaba los objetos, mantenía limpia la cocina o el cuarto de baño, porque carecía de un mundo imaginario al que prestar aquellos cuidados."
According to Droit - and my own experience - this world is operated by objects. According to Millás and social constructionism it is operated by ideologies which are packets of certain ideas and thoughts. - If you think that objects are part of various ideologies, you might be right as well.
If you want to read some more about ideologies it is worth reading An Introduction to Social Constructionism by Vivien Burr (ISBN: 0-415-10405-X).
As to the human aspect of our two-seconds pre-knowlwdge system, you had better mark all business and other appointments in your agenda. I was wandering among ´part time objects´ and ´transitional objects´, when somebody called me. She was wondering if I was going to arrive in a meeting or not.
Tickets are a mark of business and so are credit cards. Taxis are nice. You need not open and close the garage door before leaving. Neither need you find any parking place when arriving.
On the back seat you can quickly check what the topic of the meeting is. You can collect your ideas. Yoy can plan how to turn the meeting into business profiting you and all other partners as well as their networks. In other words, you have time enough to make sure that your two-second organizer of life is synchronised with your short- and long-term goals - and that they are in harmony with your dreams.
I have a ticket and hotel reservation in Madrid in a couple of weeks´ time. That is part of my twenty-year dream becoming true little by little.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Constructing Memories and Prizing Books
Estoy leyendo el libro Mira si yo te querré por Luis Leante (ISBN: 978-84-204-7195-2). El texto me fascina. Es uno de los libros que no quieres dejar al lado antes de haber disfrutado las últimas palabras, uno de los libros que te abren un mundo nuevo sin visitas anteriores. Por lo menos a mí me pasa éste.
One day people in the radio were telling how the world economy is stumbling and probably falling down.
"In Japan unemployed men still go on living their daily routine as they did before. They leave their home in the morning. With their briefcase in the hand they go and walk around in the parks until it´s time to come back home. They want to hide the fact that they have no job to go to."
If you think of your memory span, it normally is as long as your life. However, we need not consciously carry around all that has happened to and around us. Our subconscious mind takes care of the administration of the stored material. We remember something just when there are enough reasons for that, when there are lively enough triggers to wake the memories up.
The person who was telling about the desperate behaviour of Japanese unemployed men had to be very small in the beginning of the 90´s. Had he been an adult living normal life in Finland, he wouldn´t have needed to situate his story to Japan. The same happened here. We, too, had people pretending to go to work in the mornings. As they had no job to go to, they went somewhere else to hide their shame.
The memory span of an individual person extends to some 90+ years, maximum. The memory span of a culture can be shorter. New generations construct new worlds. In their construction work they do not necessarily use the same material the previous generations did. That is because they do not have the same first-hand experiences the previous generations had and they may also consciously refuse to listen to those who have them.
I still remember how a famous Finnish pop singer and actress burst out in the 70´s that the Finns haven´t experienced anything dramatic. She had friends in Greece then.
No doubt the situation was difficult in Greece, but twenty years earlier it had been much more difficult and unbearable here in her own country. In fact it had been bad enough to largely soften the traumatic memories of the civil war in 1918.
Finns as a nation had experienced bad times, but they were not a part of her own personal experiences. That´s why they became insignificant to her. The 1968 generation did its best to re-evaluate what their grandparents, fathers and mothers had gone through. Later on growing age has given more perspective...
Reading Mira si yo te querré by Luis Leante is of utmost interest to me, because my personal memory bank was empty as regards to the material concerning the events in Spanish Sahara in the 1960´s and 70´s. I had to read twice the following chapter of the book to make sure that I understood it correctly:
"Eran tres Mirage F1 franceses Los conocía bien: los mejores aparatos del Ejército marroquí. Se acercaron como una punta de flecha, descargando su carga mortal con precisión. En cuanto cayeron las primeras bombas, el pánico se apoderó del campamento. El napalm y el fósforo blanco..."
Yes, it really says that napalm and white phosphorus were used to kill civilian people having escaped the war. Napalm bombing in Sahara is not difficult to imagine, but it certainly is disgusting to admit it having taken place also in Sahara.
When reading the text I started wondering why, all of a sudden, there is a certain odd character introduced by the author. What was this character for? As you might read the book one day, I´m not going to tell anything more about that. Having reached the end of the story I understood that the author had very few choices. It is exactly this character that makes me remember what was taking place in the Spanish Sahara thirty years go. That particular figure functions as a Gestalt.
They say that the most remarkable difference between human beings and dinosaurs lies in the fact that dinosaurs were not capable of artistic expression. We are able to describe our perceptions and experiences to one another by means of words, movements and pictures. Dinosaurs weren´t. Art makes it possible for us to extend and enlarge our memory bank to cover what hasn´t happened directly to us. It makes us priviledged in the sense that we can efficiently learn from other people´s experiences.
How often do we make use of that possibility? Maybe on the individual level every now and then, but on the level of cultures, the answer is more difficult to give.
Perhaps you noticed that our former president of the state Martti Ahtisaari has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Peace. If we really learned from other people´s experiences, we would arrange peace negotiations before napalm and white phosphorus are used, and not just after that.
Every autumn Finnish editors select a politician or another prominent person and hand him or her a plastic bag full of books of the year. Lists of the books are published. Their sales go up. In a few weeks´ time this person arrives at a special press conference to announce the winner of the Finlandia Prize for Literature of the year.
What follows is a lot of talk about why just that person was chosen to choose, why he or she made that particular decision, what the current state of the Finnish literature is etc. Sales figures of those particular books go up again. People feel relieved. Deciding what books to buy as a Christmas present has become easier. You either buy the prize candidates or you buy the ones never mentioned in that list.
Having read interesting books in Spanish I have learned to appreciate the book prizing systems. Had Mira si yo the querré not had the red tape telling that it is the winner of the Premio Alfaguara 2007, I might never have found it. You can find the English translation of it with the name See How Much I Love You. Somebody might enjoy having it as a Christmas present or para hacer un regalo de los Reyes.
Which would give better results - to choose what to read from the list of Premio Alfaguara or to check the books on the shelves of the city library to see if there are more prize-winning books there?
The number of Spanish books in the city library is not too large. Anyway it is larger than the one offered by the Academic Bookshop. They used to stock more Spanish books when we had very few Spanish speaking people here. Now that you can hear Spanish almost daily somewhere in town, the stock is smaller. How come?
When pulling the Spanish books out from the shelf one by one in the library, I check if they are covered with any tape indicating a prize won. That is how I found El amante bilingüe by Juan Mars, Premio Ateneo de Sevilla 1990.
Had I known the name of the author for some particular reason I would have found even his horoscope in the internet. Maybe even his favourite food and the contents of his wardrope.
Somehow - and so far - I like my own touch-and-look searching method more than any systematic Internet search for famous prizes and their winners. No doubt my method is dusty, but the role of the random chance grows bigger. You never know what you´ll find. Additionally you might meet someone special in the library or on the way there. The city library is popular and it has become our common livingroom.
Thinking of the economic recessions and other personal catastrophies we meet in life, it is very important to have nice and free public places where we can go to spend time and meet friends. It is not fun, nor is it comforting, to go to shopping centres, if you are broke or just feel miserable. We need shared space free of commercial push and pull.
Maybe we should pay more attention to creating interesting shared spaces. In Finland the approaching winter reminds us that most of the time must soon be spent indoors. We are just saying a seven-to-eight-month good-bye to the time spent lazying around in the parks and streets. Who decides now where you can sit down for a nice chat with your friends?
It´s funny that we prefer summer pictures to those taken in winter. If you looked at the photos of the Tampere City library above, only the first one of them shows some melting spring-time snow. The picture is far too sunny to have been be taken in October , or even in January.
Maybe it is normal for all of us to live in a dream world. We Finns have about four months more or less warm weather and eight months of cold and frost - warm overcoats, boots, mittens, scarves, socks and stockings - and anyhow we want to emphasize that it mostly is sunny, nice, warm and cosy here. We do not do that for the purposes of tourism only. We do it for ourselves as well.
A piece of advice - it´s no use of trying to sell, market or present candles in Finland in summer time. As we have no night then, the candle light is difficult to see and makes no impression. It makes no difference that would make a difference you aimed at.
This is the time for candles, hot coffee, chocolate, good books and literary conversations. You do not meet so many people by chance now. Anyhow, it is nice to know that a person who reads is never lonely. Having read something you´ll have ideas to share. You feel inspired to take the initiative to call your friends for a cup of coffee. You even want to talk to people whom you don´t know yet as you want to find out what they want to share with you...
Be careful with candles! Enjoy!
One day people in the radio were telling how the world economy is stumbling and probably falling down.
"In Japan unemployed men still go on living their daily routine as they did before. They leave their home in the morning. With their briefcase in the hand they go and walk around in the parks until it´s time to come back home. They want to hide the fact that they have no job to go to."
If you think of your memory span, it normally is as long as your life. However, we need not consciously carry around all that has happened to and around us. Our subconscious mind takes care of the administration of the stored material. We remember something just when there are enough reasons for that, when there are lively enough triggers to wake the memories up.
The person who was telling about the desperate behaviour of Japanese unemployed men had to be very small in the beginning of the 90´s. Had he been an adult living normal life in Finland, he wouldn´t have needed to situate his story to Japan. The same happened here. We, too, had people pretending to go to work in the mornings. As they had no job to go to, they went somewhere else to hide their shame.
The memory span of an individual person extends to some 90+ years, maximum. The memory span of a culture can be shorter. New generations construct new worlds. In their construction work they do not necessarily use the same material the previous generations did. That is because they do not have the same first-hand experiences the previous generations had and they may also consciously refuse to listen to those who have them.
I still remember how a famous Finnish pop singer and actress burst out in the 70´s that the Finns haven´t experienced anything dramatic. She had friends in Greece then.
No doubt the situation was difficult in Greece, but twenty years earlier it had been much more difficult and unbearable here in her own country. In fact it had been bad enough to largely soften the traumatic memories of the civil war in 1918.
Finns as a nation had experienced bad times, but they were not a part of her own personal experiences. That´s why they became insignificant to her. The 1968 generation did its best to re-evaluate what their grandparents, fathers and mothers had gone through. Later on growing age has given more perspective...
Reading Mira si yo te querré by Luis Leante is of utmost interest to me, because my personal memory bank was empty as regards to the material concerning the events in Spanish Sahara in the 1960´s and 70´s. I had to read twice the following chapter of the book to make sure that I understood it correctly:
"Eran tres Mirage F1 franceses Los conocía bien: los mejores aparatos del Ejército marroquí. Se acercaron como una punta de flecha, descargando su carga mortal con precisión. En cuanto cayeron las primeras bombas, el pánico se apoderó del campamento. El napalm y el fósforo blanco..."
Yes, it really says that napalm and white phosphorus were used to kill civilian people having escaped the war. Napalm bombing in Sahara is not difficult to imagine, but it certainly is disgusting to admit it having taken place also in Sahara.
When reading the text I started wondering why, all of a sudden, there is a certain odd character introduced by the author. What was this character for? As you might read the book one day, I´m not going to tell anything more about that. Having reached the end of the story I understood that the author had very few choices. It is exactly this character that makes me remember what was taking place in the Spanish Sahara thirty years go. That particular figure functions as a Gestalt.
They say that the most remarkable difference between human beings and dinosaurs lies in the fact that dinosaurs were not capable of artistic expression. We are able to describe our perceptions and experiences to one another by means of words, movements and pictures. Dinosaurs weren´t. Art makes it possible for us to extend and enlarge our memory bank to cover what hasn´t happened directly to us. It makes us priviledged in the sense that we can efficiently learn from other people´s experiences.
How often do we make use of that possibility? Maybe on the individual level every now and then, but on the level of cultures, the answer is more difficult to give.
Perhaps you noticed that our former president of the state Martti Ahtisaari has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Peace. If we really learned from other people´s experiences, we would arrange peace negotiations before napalm and white phosphorus are used, and not just after that.
Every autumn Finnish editors select a politician or another prominent person and hand him or her a plastic bag full of books of the year. Lists of the books are published. Their sales go up. In a few weeks´ time this person arrives at a special press conference to announce the winner of the Finlandia Prize for Literature of the year.
What follows is a lot of talk about why just that person was chosen to choose, why he or she made that particular decision, what the current state of the Finnish literature is etc. Sales figures of those particular books go up again. People feel relieved. Deciding what books to buy as a Christmas present has become easier. You either buy the prize candidates or you buy the ones never mentioned in that list.
Having read interesting books in Spanish I have learned to appreciate the book prizing systems. Had Mira si yo the querré not had the red tape telling that it is the winner of the Premio Alfaguara 2007, I might never have found it. You can find the English translation of it with the name See How Much I Love You. Somebody might enjoy having it as a Christmas present or para hacer un regalo de los Reyes.
Which would give better results - to choose what to read from the list of Premio Alfaguara or to check the books on the shelves of the city library to see if there are more prize-winning books there?
The number of Spanish books in the city library is not too large. Anyway it is larger than the one offered by the Academic Bookshop. They used to stock more Spanish books when we had very few Spanish speaking people here. Now that you can hear Spanish almost daily somewhere in town, the stock is smaller. How come?
When pulling the Spanish books out from the shelf one by one in the library, I check if they are covered with any tape indicating a prize won. That is how I found El amante bilingüe by Juan Mars, Premio Ateneo de Sevilla 1990.
Had I known the name of the author for some particular reason I would have found even his horoscope in the internet. Maybe even his favourite food and the contents of his wardrope.
Somehow - and so far - I like my own touch-and-look searching method more than any systematic Internet search for famous prizes and their winners. No doubt my method is dusty, but the role of the random chance grows bigger. You never know what you´ll find. Additionally you might meet someone special in the library or on the way there. The city library is popular and it has become our common livingroom.
Thinking of the economic recessions and other personal catastrophies we meet in life, it is very important to have nice and free public places where we can go to spend time and meet friends. It is not fun, nor is it comforting, to go to shopping centres, if you are broke or just feel miserable. We need shared space free of commercial push and pull.
Maybe we should pay more attention to creating interesting shared spaces. In Finland the approaching winter reminds us that most of the time must soon be spent indoors. We are just saying a seven-to-eight-month good-bye to the time spent lazying around in the parks and streets. Who decides now where you can sit down for a nice chat with your friends?
It´s funny that we prefer summer pictures to those taken in winter. If you looked at the photos of the Tampere City library above, only the first one of them shows some melting spring-time snow. The picture is far too sunny to have been be taken in October , or even in January.
Maybe it is normal for all of us to live in a dream world. We Finns have about four months more or less warm weather and eight months of cold and frost - warm overcoats, boots, mittens, scarves, socks and stockings - and anyhow we want to emphasize that it mostly is sunny, nice, warm and cosy here. We do not do that for the purposes of tourism only. We do it for ourselves as well.
A piece of advice - it´s no use of trying to sell, market or present candles in Finland in summer time. As we have no night then, the candle light is difficult to see and makes no impression. It makes no difference that would make a difference you aimed at.
This is the time for candles, hot coffee, chocolate, good books and literary conversations. You do not meet so many people by chance now. Anyhow, it is nice to know that a person who reads is never lonely. Having read something you´ll have ideas to share. You feel inspired to take the initiative to call your friends for a cup of coffee. You even want to talk to people whom you don´t know yet as you want to find out what they want to share with you...
Be careful with candles! Enjoy!
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Life Doesn´t Stop
"Sí, yo también había luchado cuando estaba en la universidad durante la dictadura franquista, e incluso después, también fui a manifestaciones y corrí ante la policía."
I fought when at the university at the time of Franco - and after that. I went to to demonstrations as well. And ran followed by the police.
I was reading La canción de Dorotea by Rosa Regás (ISBN: 84-08-04214-9) and watching how my Spanish friends of today were demonstrating and running in the streets of their youth.
"Having been hit by a policeman I said to him that he could be kind enough to help me to find my glasses." one of them told me years ago.
A short meeting with Flavia - our first one - in August brought her to the pages written by Rosa Regás. She, too, is a university lecturer, intelligent and elegant as the protagonist of the book.
What does the book La canción de Dorotea have to do with normal life in Finland? The book deals with the police in Spain - the confrontation between the big-bad-masculine and the good-small-feminine.
Maybe I´m naive, but in this case I have to say that probably all Finns are naive in the sense athat we trust the police. We think that the police are reliable and trustworthy. If the police asks for help to find out some information, people really help them. Helping them was to self-evident that I was surprised to hear that, for instance in Poland, people refuse to do that. They don´t help the police. Well, that is easy to understand and even to accept, if you think that the authorities in Poland have so often been representatives of a foreign power. In Finland the police is ours, not theirs or of any group that would have taken the power by force.
This does not mean that the police would be somehow respected. They aren´t. Some years ago two policemen were walking in the open market place in Kuopio. A foreigner approached them asking "Do you speak English?" The policemen shook the head. The man asked "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" and got the same answer. He asked "Talar ni svenska?" The answer remained equally negative. He went on asking in French, Russian, Spanish and Italian. As none of them gave any positive result, the tourist turned to walk away.
"It would be so useful to speak some foreign languages." one of the policemen said watching the helpless-looking foreigner going down the street. "Maybe I should start learning some." he pondered.
"I don´t think it´s worth the trouble." the other one said. "Didn´t you see what happened to this man? He speaks seven languages and none of them was of any use."
One of the most popular Finnish authors is Mika Waltari. His book The Egyptian has been translated into several languages. It was published in 1945 and it still remains as one of the mark books most Finnish people really read.
My grandmother told me that my grandfather made her read The Egyptian aloud when he was lying on his deathbed.
However, you need not be in any exceptionally active process of dying to read The Egyptian.
You can also imagine that especially in the after-the-war situation people must have appreciated the idea that life goes on, no matter what happens. It has been going on since the ancient Egypt. Additionally it still offers you exactly the same periods of pain and short moments of happiness it always has offered.
As it is the 100 anniversary of Mika Waltari, you might be interested in reading some of his books. What has been translated into English are his historical novels, but Waltari has written about the Finnish police as well. One of his protagonists is inspector Palmu. I happen to own one of the inspector Palmu books in Spanish. The name is Juego Peligroso, una traducción de Komisario Palmun ereydys, Editorial L.A.R.A. Barcelona, Primera edición, 1953. It really says ´ereydys´ instead of ´erehdys´. At that time ISBN-numebers didn´t exist and every letter in the book has been selected individually. The paper is thin and beautifully brownish.
"De los días de la semana que más aversión produce permanecer en una comisaría de policía, el lunes es el peor de todos. Aquella mañana, ademas, el comisario Palmu estaba de peor talante de lo que tenía por costumbre." the book starts.
If you have any opportunity, you might be interested in seeing some of the Komisario Palmu films shot by Matti Kassila. Seeing them and reading the Palmu books would reveal to you how to be a respected and trustworthy police inspector in this country and why intelligence and efficiency are not the most important requirements for being able to make a good, harmless Finnish policeman.
"El asesinato - me dijo - es la forma más concluyente del delito, ya que no existe reparación posible. Los bienes robados pueden ser recuperados, y el honor en entredicho puede ser restablecido. Incluso una falsificación, con el tiempo, puede ser olvidada... El tiempo lo borra todo, todo, ya que las personas poseen una memoria muy débil. Pero a una persona muerta, asesinada, nadie es capaz de devolverle la vida."
My Spanish friend Teresa asked me in an email, what happened to the boy who some time ago shot eleven people in his class. We all have been asking the same question: What happened to him? Why did all that happen?
He was not an extraverted person, but neither was he outstandingly introverted and isolated. He had been mopped by other students, but so have many others. Mopping is strictly forbidden and largely eliminated in schools, but it finds new and "sophisticated" forms. As human beings we are very talented in pointing out otherness around us. Finnish schools have received record results in PISA-research, but simultaneusly students say that they do not like school. If you were aa authentic, real teen-ager, would you confess that you like school?
He was twenty-two - and thinking from the inspector Palmu time-perspective he could have been a family-man in the 40´s and 50´s having to carry the corresponding responsibilities. In 2008 he was a student trying to find out where his place in the society would be.
Since the year 2002 he had been playing in his head with his bad memories, guns, internet, the ideology of human life as a source of all bad on the earth, as well as with the idea of leaving his own footsteps in the history of the humankind.
I find it very difficult to say who are to blame for not having been able to stop him - or any other people having done the same.
Maybe you know that the boy was interviewed by a policeman before he was given a permission to buy a gun. The policeofficer didn´t find out in a short discussion that the quiet, neat-looking young student was totally queer in his head.
Having been able to hide it for so many years in front of so many people, why would he fail now in front of this policeman? Had he been interviewed by a physician, would it have changed the situation? Had he not been given a legal gun, would he have looked for an illegal one instead?
There is no end to these questions... Some papers wrote that the life stopped. They were wrong. Life does not stop. It goes on. No matter what you do and what happens to you life goes on. Isn´t it a comforting idea, after all? Life goes on and it is our only opportunity to laugh and cry, to fear and to be courageous...
I fought when at the university at the time of Franco - and after that. I went to to demonstrations as well. And ran followed by the police.
I was reading La canción de Dorotea by Rosa Regás (ISBN: 84-08-04214-9) and watching how my Spanish friends of today were demonstrating and running in the streets of their youth.
"Having been hit by a policeman I said to him that he could be kind enough to help me to find my glasses." one of them told me years ago.
A short meeting with Flavia - our first one - in August brought her to the pages written by Rosa Regás. She, too, is a university lecturer, intelligent and elegant as the protagonist of the book.
What does the book La canción de Dorotea have to do with normal life in Finland? The book deals with the police in Spain - the confrontation between the big-bad-masculine and the good-small-feminine.
Maybe I´m naive, but in this case I have to say that probably all Finns are naive in the sense athat we trust the police. We think that the police are reliable and trustworthy. If the police asks for help to find out some information, people really help them. Helping them was to self-evident that I was surprised to hear that, for instance in Poland, people refuse to do that. They don´t help the police. Well, that is easy to understand and even to accept, if you think that the authorities in Poland have so often been representatives of a foreign power. In Finland the police is ours, not theirs or of any group that would have taken the power by force.
This does not mean that the police would be somehow respected. They aren´t. Some years ago two policemen were walking in the open market place in Kuopio. A foreigner approached them asking "Do you speak English?" The policemen shook the head. The man asked "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" and got the same answer. He asked "Talar ni svenska?" The answer remained equally negative. He went on asking in French, Russian, Spanish and Italian. As none of them gave any positive result, the tourist turned to walk away.
"It would be so useful to speak some foreign languages." one of the policemen said watching the helpless-looking foreigner going down the street. "Maybe I should start learning some." he pondered.
"I don´t think it´s worth the trouble." the other one said. "Didn´t you see what happened to this man? He speaks seven languages and none of them was of any use."
One of the most popular Finnish authors is Mika Waltari. His book The Egyptian has been translated into several languages. It was published in 1945 and it still remains as one of the mark books most Finnish people really read.
My grandmother told me that my grandfather made her read The Egyptian aloud when he was lying on his deathbed.
However, you need not be in any exceptionally active process of dying to read The Egyptian.
You can also imagine that especially in the after-the-war situation people must have appreciated the idea that life goes on, no matter what happens. It has been going on since the ancient Egypt. Additionally it still offers you exactly the same periods of pain and short moments of happiness it always has offered.
As it is the 100 anniversary of Mika Waltari, you might be interested in reading some of his books. What has been translated into English are his historical novels, but Waltari has written about the Finnish police as well. One of his protagonists is inspector Palmu. I happen to own one of the inspector Palmu books in Spanish. The name is Juego Peligroso, una traducción de Komisario Palmun ereydys, Editorial L.A.R.A. Barcelona, Primera edición, 1953. It really says ´ereydys´ instead of ´erehdys´. At that time ISBN-numebers didn´t exist and every letter in the book has been selected individually. The paper is thin and beautifully brownish.
"De los días de la semana que más aversión produce permanecer en una comisaría de policía, el lunes es el peor de todos. Aquella mañana, ademas, el comisario Palmu estaba de peor talante de lo que tenía por costumbre." the book starts.
If you have any opportunity, you might be interested in seeing some of the Komisario Palmu films shot by Matti Kassila. Seeing them and reading the Palmu books would reveal to you how to be a respected and trustworthy police inspector in this country and why intelligence and efficiency are not the most important requirements for being able to make a good, harmless Finnish policeman.
"El asesinato - me dijo - es la forma más concluyente del delito, ya que no existe reparación posible. Los bienes robados pueden ser recuperados, y el honor en entredicho puede ser restablecido. Incluso una falsificación, con el tiempo, puede ser olvidada... El tiempo lo borra todo, todo, ya que las personas poseen una memoria muy débil. Pero a una persona muerta, asesinada, nadie es capaz de devolverle la vida."
My Spanish friend Teresa asked me in an email, what happened to the boy who some time ago shot eleven people in his class. We all have been asking the same question: What happened to him? Why did all that happen?
He was not an extraverted person, but neither was he outstandingly introverted and isolated. He had been mopped by other students, but so have many others. Mopping is strictly forbidden and largely eliminated in schools, but it finds new and "sophisticated" forms. As human beings we are very talented in pointing out otherness around us. Finnish schools have received record results in PISA-research, but simultaneusly students say that they do not like school. If you were aa authentic, real teen-ager, would you confess that you like school?
He was twenty-two - and thinking from the inspector Palmu time-perspective he could have been a family-man in the 40´s and 50´s having to carry the corresponding responsibilities. In 2008 he was a student trying to find out where his place in the society would be.
Since the year 2002 he had been playing in his head with his bad memories, guns, internet, the ideology of human life as a source of all bad on the earth, as well as with the idea of leaving his own footsteps in the history of the humankind.
I find it very difficult to say who are to blame for not having been able to stop him - or any other people having done the same.
Maybe you know that the boy was interviewed by a policeman before he was given a permission to buy a gun. The policeofficer didn´t find out in a short discussion that the quiet, neat-looking young student was totally queer in his head.
Having been able to hide it for so many years in front of so many people, why would he fail now in front of this policeman? Had he been interviewed by a physician, would it have changed the situation? Had he not been given a legal gun, would he have looked for an illegal one instead?
There is no end to these questions... Some papers wrote that the life stopped. They were wrong. Life does not stop. It goes on. No matter what you do and what happens to you life goes on. Isn´t it a comforting idea, after all? Life goes on and it is our only opportunity to laugh and cry, to fear and to be courageous...
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Mortality and Procreation
"It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals - but then we are remarkable creatures. Perhaps it is our nature to recognize subconsciously the link between mortality and procreation - between, that is to say, the finite and the infinite - and we are in fact driven by reminders of the one to seek out the other."
That is an extract of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid (ISBN:978-0-141-03602-1). The book caught me at the airport. I have no idea why it happened, but I am really glad it did.
We are remarkable, as Hamid says, and obviously some of us are even more remarkable than others. Reading the book you might tend to classify Moshin Hamid into the group of the more remarkable among us.
Having written that I remember a particular occurence that took place maybe fifteen years ago.
In Finland seeing any beggars was an absolute impossibility before. Today, if you see one, you know that they come from elsewhere in Europe. They are one of the consequences of our membership in the European Union and Shengen.
In a thoroughly Protestant country you know that giving out money or anything else to anybody is not an investment in your own better future. Giving away your riches, looking for personal suffering, fasting etc. does not bring us Protestants any special benefits, not in the eyes of other people nor in those of God. This thinking does not favour the institutes of begging and beggars. However, this does not mean that we would not take care of the poor and needy.
For us taking care of them is not the responsibility of individual people. Taking care of the poor and weak is a joint project which needs to be organised as a joint effort. To be able to do that we pay taxes. Taxes are means to construct common good. Taxes liberate us as individuals. We need not worry about the poor and weak. We have systems that take care of their well-being. As individuals we can concentrate on other things - like working hard, for instance.
Why to complain about taxes, if they make your everyday life safe and comfortable? You can send your children to school - walking alone. You need not build walls and fences around your house. You may forget to lock your door for the night and nothing happens.
Would you be a happy tax-payer, if you had that kind of every-day luxury in your life - all paid for by your taxes?
"You have high taxes, but you also get things in return." my Spanish friend said and opened my eyes to see that it is true. In fact, statistics show that Finnish people are willing to pay their high taxes provided the poor and helpless people are taken care of, the educational and health care systems work properly, roads are in good condition and electricity runs as steadily as it does. The government collects taxes. In return citizens get services which makes the normal life run smoothly. So why to complain?
Why do I write about this? I have been reading some Robert Kiyosaki books lately. He seems to be telling that the rich people in his own country - the US - do all they can to avoid taxes. It is as if finding ways to avoid taxes were the main motivation to become rich and wealthy.
From the Finnish perspective the consequences of that kind of thinking look questionable. In a society where just some have and many do not, those who have must make sure that the many stay outside. However, to keep them outside becomes more and more costly which means that in the long run you are losing money anyway. You are forced to build a wall around your house, to reinforce your door, to bar your windows, to pay a high price for your leasure time and sports facilities, to find expensive educational institutes for your children, to escort them to school etc.
Kiyosaki emphasizes avoiding taxes. Maybe Kioyosaki just forgets to tell us about the positive things wealthy people do in the society. If he told that avoiding taxes makes it possible for the rich to employ people, for instance, even us Finns would feel less puzzled with his texts.
Who of the world-famous sociologists was it who said that the development of capitalism is a direct consequence of the protestant work ethic? It must be true in the sense that we Protestants are taught not to be lazy. However, we are also told that all you need to do is just to trust in the unconditional love of God. There is no need make any effort to please him. Just trust and accept his love. You are good and loved just as you are.
No special activities, no searching for special feelings or anything like that is needed, just simple, childlike trust and belief in God´s unconditional love. Really simple, isn´t it?
All these explanations come from what I wrote about Moshin Hamid above. I realised to have written that Hamid as a person might be somehow more remarkable than others. Seen from the strict Protestant perspective I made a mistake. For Protestants all people are normal people. All have have the same "value" as human beings. Some may use their mental and physical capacities more intelligently than others, but each one of us is equally important and valuable.
In Finland you are not disturbed by beggars, but it is highly possible that you will be disturbed by drunken men wanting to communicate with you. It is embarassing and unpleasant.
Years ago I was travelling with my children from Tampere to Helsinki. A goup of drunken men were noisily exchanging their ideas about topics I didn´t like my children to hear anything about. But the train was full and we could not move anywhere else.
Next morning at the hotel breakfast similar not-for-children-to-hear conversation was repeated by another group of drunken men. I felt angry. Later I complained about the occurences to a friend of mine. She listened to me with empathy and burst out: "Yes, isn´t that disgusting! And think that God loves them just as much as he loves us!"
So far it is the best sermon I have ever heard.
Hamid´s text is provocative. As promised by the back cover, it makes you think. I would say that it captures you. You need not go to the Amsterdam airport to find the book. The ISBN will find it to you in any bookshop. Having read it you may realise that many of our thoughts are predetermined, "zu Hause gebacken" much before we find ourselves in the situation proper. We are strongly preprogrammed by our fears and prejudices.
Preprogrammed or not? You might want to test yourself. There was a story in a newspaper:
"They met in a bar in New York. It was getting late. He promsed to drive her home. She realised that he took a quiet, dark route. Suddenly the car stopped. He turned to her saying: "This shortcut is so much quicker. Thanks for your nice company."
Mortality and procreation side by side, all the time, everywhere.
That is an extract of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid (ISBN:978-0-141-03602-1). The book caught me at the airport. I have no idea why it happened, but I am really glad it did.
We are remarkable, as Hamid says, and obviously some of us are even more remarkable than others. Reading the book you might tend to classify Moshin Hamid into the group of the more remarkable among us.
Having written that I remember a particular occurence that took place maybe fifteen years ago.
In Finland seeing any beggars was an absolute impossibility before. Today, if you see one, you know that they come from elsewhere in Europe. They are one of the consequences of our membership in the European Union and Shengen.
In a thoroughly Protestant country you know that giving out money or anything else to anybody is not an investment in your own better future. Giving away your riches, looking for personal suffering, fasting etc. does not bring us Protestants any special benefits, not in the eyes of other people nor in those of God. This thinking does not favour the institutes of begging and beggars. However, this does not mean that we would not take care of the poor and needy.
For us taking care of them is not the responsibility of individual people. Taking care of the poor and weak is a joint project which needs to be organised as a joint effort. To be able to do that we pay taxes. Taxes are means to construct common good. Taxes liberate us as individuals. We need not worry about the poor and weak. We have systems that take care of their well-being. As individuals we can concentrate on other things - like working hard, for instance.
Why to complain about taxes, if they make your everyday life safe and comfortable? You can send your children to school - walking alone. You need not build walls and fences around your house. You may forget to lock your door for the night and nothing happens.
Would you be a happy tax-payer, if you had that kind of every-day luxury in your life - all paid for by your taxes?
"You have high taxes, but you also get things in return." my Spanish friend said and opened my eyes to see that it is true. In fact, statistics show that Finnish people are willing to pay their high taxes provided the poor and helpless people are taken care of, the educational and health care systems work properly, roads are in good condition and electricity runs as steadily as it does. The government collects taxes. In return citizens get services which makes the normal life run smoothly. So why to complain?
Why do I write about this? I have been reading some Robert Kiyosaki books lately. He seems to be telling that the rich people in his own country - the US - do all they can to avoid taxes. It is as if finding ways to avoid taxes were the main motivation to become rich and wealthy.
From the Finnish perspective the consequences of that kind of thinking look questionable. In a society where just some have and many do not, those who have must make sure that the many stay outside. However, to keep them outside becomes more and more costly which means that in the long run you are losing money anyway. You are forced to build a wall around your house, to reinforce your door, to bar your windows, to pay a high price for your leasure time and sports facilities, to find expensive educational institutes for your children, to escort them to school etc.
Kiyosaki emphasizes avoiding taxes. Maybe Kioyosaki just forgets to tell us about the positive things wealthy people do in the society. If he told that avoiding taxes makes it possible for the rich to employ people, for instance, even us Finns would feel less puzzled with his texts.
Who of the world-famous sociologists was it who said that the development of capitalism is a direct consequence of the protestant work ethic? It must be true in the sense that we Protestants are taught not to be lazy. However, we are also told that all you need to do is just to trust in the unconditional love of God. There is no need make any effort to please him. Just trust and accept his love. You are good and loved just as you are.
No special activities, no searching for special feelings or anything like that is needed, just simple, childlike trust and belief in God´s unconditional love. Really simple, isn´t it?
All these explanations come from what I wrote about Moshin Hamid above. I realised to have written that Hamid as a person might be somehow more remarkable than others. Seen from the strict Protestant perspective I made a mistake. For Protestants all people are normal people. All have have the same "value" as human beings. Some may use their mental and physical capacities more intelligently than others, but each one of us is equally important and valuable.
In Finland you are not disturbed by beggars, but it is highly possible that you will be disturbed by drunken men wanting to communicate with you. It is embarassing and unpleasant.
Years ago I was travelling with my children from Tampere to Helsinki. A goup of drunken men were noisily exchanging their ideas about topics I didn´t like my children to hear anything about. But the train was full and we could not move anywhere else.
Next morning at the hotel breakfast similar not-for-children-to-hear conversation was repeated by another group of drunken men. I felt angry. Later I complained about the occurences to a friend of mine. She listened to me with empathy and burst out: "Yes, isn´t that disgusting! And think that God loves them just as much as he loves us!"
So far it is the best sermon I have ever heard.
Hamid´s text is provocative. As promised by the back cover, it makes you think. I would say that it captures you. You need not go to the Amsterdam airport to find the book. The ISBN will find it to you in any bookshop. Having read it you may realise that many of our thoughts are predetermined, "zu Hause gebacken" much before we find ourselves in the situation proper. We are strongly preprogrammed by our fears and prejudices.
Preprogrammed or not? You might want to test yourself. There was a story in a newspaper:
"They met in a bar in New York. It was getting late. He promsed to drive her home. She realised that he took a quiet, dark route. Suddenly the car stopped. He turned to her saying: "This shortcut is so much quicker. Thanks for your nice company."
Mortality and procreation side by side, all the time, everywhere.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Existing or Strangely Inexisting?
"The word you just said does not exist." says my native Spanish friend having listened to my explanation of the difference between commercial and financial thinking in Spanish.
"Abrigos de verano no hay." "There are no summer overcoats." Julio answers when I ask him if I should wear a summer overcoat when coming to Madrid in october.
"No entiedo. Este no suele pasar. Nunca pasa." "I do not understand. This does not happen. It never happens." the hostel staff keeps on repeating after my trousers have strangely disappeared from the wardrope of my room in Madrid.
It seems to me that beside the worlds of either-or and both-and there is also a world of existing and strangely inexisting things. Not simply inexisting things, but strangely inexisting things.
If something does not exist, it does not exist. And that´s that. But if something is strangely inexisting, your thoughts or your hands have been in contact with the thing. If they hadn´t, you would never be able to have an idea about it. In other words, something has been normal first and then slipped out of the reach of normality into the inexistence.
This quick slipping into the world of inexistence is easy to understand when you think of the inexisting words you might just have uttered.
"Zu Hause gebacken." "Home baked" my teacher of German used to say.
Home baked words and expressions are concrete in the sense words normally are concrete, but they do not correspond to the generally accepted linguistic standards. Luckily all communication is as tightly context-bound as it is. In suitable circumstances we get surprisingly well along with home baked linguistic material. - In fact, if you become too much conscious of it, you might never learn proper ways to express yourself in a foreign language.
In folk music and foreign language learning there are no mistakes. All depends on what you do next.
It takes a bit more effort to accept the existence of the strangely inexisting things, when the inexistance refers to concrete objects and not just to words and expressions.
There are clear climatic and cultural reasons for some things to exist or not. The idea of summer overcoats is ridiculous in Spain. In Finland we need several types of coats and shoes for every season. Even summer overcoats are of several variations.
Maybe we should conclude that the existence and inexistence of something is geographically bound. But if there are no geographical reasons, the slipping into inexistence of a concrete thing may result quite astonishing, even annoying. Let´s take my trousers as an example.
Our Finnish summer has been normal - warm and rainy. Maybe, exceptionally rainy. In Madrid the weather is hot. What is a proper business outfit like in such a hot weather? What to wear in the streets?
You pack your suitcase carefully, although you know that your choices will most likely go wrong. Anyway, in August it is too late to go shopping for something new as it is autumn here. Summer clothing has been sold out long ago. You pick up simple, most generally acceptable garments - like black trousers - knowing that even that choice will go wrong.
In the Mediterranean you concretely feel how the people you meet for the first time let their eyes travel down along your body and then come up again, you almost hear how they decide who you are and what you are good for. In those cultures clothing speaks loudly.
It is quite understandable that you would like to say something reasonable in the same language in return. Anyway, you know that the likelihood of disturbing interference - is all interference disturbing? - is so obvious in so many levels of communication that you try to make your best to minimize it.
The wardrope was empty. The staff was genuinly astounded by the idea that my trousers had slipped into the world of the strangely inexisting things without having left any more traces of their existence than my idea of them having served truthfully in both everyday and special occasions.
Having got back home again it was safe to feel the plus ten degrees weather to greet you - not too coldly. In Madrid it was thirty-five abouts. I also went to buy two pairs of black trousers to replace the untruthful ones. I´ll go back to Madrid in the beginning of December. You can be sure that i`ll keep an eye on my simple black trousers to find out how the slipping into the strange worlds actually takes place.
Maybe we should pay more attention to the different versions of the world we function in, because each of them offers different types of opportunities as well. You know, the worlds of either-or, both-and and the one of the existing or strangely inexisting things.
"Abrigos de verano no hay." "There are no summer overcoats." Julio answers when I ask him if I should wear a summer overcoat when coming to Madrid in october.
"No entiedo. Este no suele pasar. Nunca pasa." "I do not understand. This does not happen. It never happens." the hostel staff keeps on repeating after my trousers have strangely disappeared from the wardrope of my room in Madrid.
It seems to me that beside the worlds of either-or and both-and there is also a world of existing and strangely inexisting things. Not simply inexisting things, but strangely inexisting things.
If something does not exist, it does not exist. And that´s that. But if something is strangely inexisting, your thoughts or your hands have been in contact with the thing. If they hadn´t, you would never be able to have an idea about it. In other words, something has been normal first and then slipped out of the reach of normality into the inexistence.
This quick slipping into the world of inexistence is easy to understand when you think of the inexisting words you might just have uttered.
"Zu Hause gebacken." "Home baked" my teacher of German used to say.
Home baked words and expressions are concrete in the sense words normally are concrete, but they do not correspond to the generally accepted linguistic standards. Luckily all communication is as tightly context-bound as it is. In suitable circumstances we get surprisingly well along with home baked linguistic material. - In fact, if you become too much conscious of it, you might never learn proper ways to express yourself in a foreign language.
In folk music and foreign language learning there are no mistakes. All depends on what you do next.
It takes a bit more effort to accept the existence of the strangely inexisting things, when the inexistance refers to concrete objects and not just to words and expressions.
There are clear climatic and cultural reasons for some things to exist or not. The idea of summer overcoats is ridiculous in Spain. In Finland we need several types of coats and shoes for every season. Even summer overcoats are of several variations.
Maybe we should conclude that the existence and inexistence of something is geographically bound. But if there are no geographical reasons, the slipping into inexistence of a concrete thing may result quite astonishing, even annoying. Let´s take my trousers as an example.
Our Finnish summer has been normal - warm and rainy. Maybe, exceptionally rainy. In Madrid the weather is hot. What is a proper business outfit like in such a hot weather? What to wear in the streets?
You pack your suitcase carefully, although you know that your choices will most likely go wrong. Anyway, in August it is too late to go shopping for something new as it is autumn here. Summer clothing has been sold out long ago. You pick up simple, most generally acceptable garments - like black trousers - knowing that even that choice will go wrong.
In the Mediterranean you concretely feel how the people you meet for the first time let their eyes travel down along your body and then come up again, you almost hear how they decide who you are and what you are good for. In those cultures clothing speaks loudly.
It is quite understandable that you would like to say something reasonable in the same language in return. Anyway, you know that the likelihood of disturbing interference - is all interference disturbing? - is so obvious in so many levels of communication that you try to make your best to minimize it.
The wardrope was empty. The staff was genuinly astounded by the idea that my trousers had slipped into the world of the strangely inexisting things without having left any more traces of their existence than my idea of them having served truthfully in both everyday and special occasions.
Having got back home again it was safe to feel the plus ten degrees weather to greet you - not too coldly. In Madrid it was thirty-five abouts. I also went to buy two pairs of black trousers to replace the untruthful ones. I´ll go back to Madrid in the beginning of December. You can be sure that i`ll keep an eye on my simple black trousers to find out how the slipping into the strange worlds actually takes place.
Maybe we should pay more attention to the different versions of the world we function in, because each of them offers different types of opportunities as well. You know, the worlds of either-or, both-and and the one of the existing or strangely inexisting things.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Bits and Qubits
Once I took part in a seminar about the use of stories in therapy. For me it was an excellent learning experience. The speaker was Baruch Shulem from Israel. In the beginning he told us a story:
In the forest, under the tallest of all trees there was a solitary, whining baby eagle, obviously fallen down from the nest. It was deemed to death, unless a miracle happened.
Expectations are the gate miracles use to materialize. If a miracle is expected to happen, it normally does.
A farmer happened to be walking in the forest. He saw the miserably whining baby eagle, felt pity for it and wondered whether he could do something to save its life.
He remembered that he had hens and chickens in his farmyard in the open air. There was just a fence to stop them from running away. He could easily place the baby eagle in there. And that was what he did.
Day in, day out the hens and chickens lived their normal life running around looking for seeds and grain to eat and running away from any presumable danger. Leading their normal life new generations of chicken learnt to find eatable seeds and to escape somebody having seen any shadow of a hawk. Doing the same everybody else did the baby eagle learnt what was proper chicken behaviour, which aims were correct to aim at and what was worth fearing.
One day there were some children playing on the farmyard. They got interested in the chickens and gathered at the fence. Chicken life was interesting to look at. Some deviations in it were even more interesting. "Look, at that one. It´s not any chicken! It´s an eagle!" one of the children exclaimed.
Everybody heard that. For some strange reason the eagle paid special attention to the words. They somehow stuck in his mind. He got a curious thought: "Who do they mean? If it´s anyone of us, it might as well be me." He knew that eagles fly high. They have wings. He had wings as well. He moved them. There they were! He flapped them. They hit the air with force. For some curious reason they lifted him up a bit. Then some more. Then he found out that he could really fly.
He flew over and above the fence and the farmyard. From above he could see what the life at the farmyard was like. He could also see the forests, lakes and rivers around the farm. He could see the beauty of the world and he knew that he was free to choose.
Life among the chickens and hens had been good enough, but it wasn´t by any means the best life he could lead. If he just used his wings, he could fly free. He could fly high...
Having told the story Baruch Shulem started talking about eagle behaviour and chicken behaviour. Everybody in the audience understood what he was referring to.
A couple of days ago I heard a radio programme about information. A telephone catalogue may have the equal amount of letters as Shakespeare´s plays do. Anyhow the information value carried by the letters in Shakespeare´s plays is much higher, because they are not the letters that carry the information. The information is carried by the relation of the letters to each other.
It´s not your resources that play the decisive role in your life. It is the relation between your resources and your environment that is decisive. Our life is not determined by the opportunities that exist. It is determined by the opportunities that we happen to pay any attention to.
Dreams are the stuff life is made up of. However, in the course of the years our ordinary, normal life makes us believe two things - we have no wings and if we had there´s no need for them.
If we ever had dreams, our normal life makes us shrink their size and soften their motivational power.
If - all of a sudden - you heard somebody say "That one is not a chicken. It´s an eagle!", would know that it is you the words refer to?
The world of bits is digital. It is an either-or world. In that world you are either a chicken or an eagle.
However, there is another world of qubits. Instead of either-or, it is governed by and.
In the world of qubits you are both a chicken and an eagle. Which of them "is on" depends on your desires and expectations and they are determined by your normal life, by the surroundings you have experience of.
Expecting any nice change lately?
In the forest, under the tallest of all trees there was a solitary, whining baby eagle, obviously fallen down from the nest. It was deemed to death, unless a miracle happened.
Expectations are the gate miracles use to materialize. If a miracle is expected to happen, it normally does.
A farmer happened to be walking in the forest. He saw the miserably whining baby eagle, felt pity for it and wondered whether he could do something to save its life.
He remembered that he had hens and chickens in his farmyard in the open air. There was just a fence to stop them from running away. He could easily place the baby eagle in there. And that was what he did.
Day in, day out the hens and chickens lived their normal life running around looking for seeds and grain to eat and running away from any presumable danger. Leading their normal life new generations of chicken learnt to find eatable seeds and to escape somebody having seen any shadow of a hawk. Doing the same everybody else did the baby eagle learnt what was proper chicken behaviour, which aims were correct to aim at and what was worth fearing.
One day there were some children playing on the farmyard. They got interested in the chickens and gathered at the fence. Chicken life was interesting to look at. Some deviations in it were even more interesting. "Look, at that one. It´s not any chicken! It´s an eagle!" one of the children exclaimed.
Everybody heard that. For some strange reason the eagle paid special attention to the words. They somehow stuck in his mind. He got a curious thought: "Who do they mean? If it´s anyone of us, it might as well be me." He knew that eagles fly high. They have wings. He had wings as well. He moved them. There they were! He flapped them. They hit the air with force. For some curious reason they lifted him up a bit. Then some more. Then he found out that he could really fly.
He flew over and above the fence and the farmyard. From above he could see what the life at the farmyard was like. He could also see the forests, lakes and rivers around the farm. He could see the beauty of the world and he knew that he was free to choose.
Life among the chickens and hens had been good enough, but it wasn´t by any means the best life he could lead. If he just used his wings, he could fly free. He could fly high...
Having told the story Baruch Shulem started talking about eagle behaviour and chicken behaviour. Everybody in the audience understood what he was referring to.
A couple of days ago I heard a radio programme about information. A telephone catalogue may have the equal amount of letters as Shakespeare´s plays do. Anyhow the information value carried by the letters in Shakespeare´s plays is much higher, because they are not the letters that carry the information. The information is carried by the relation of the letters to each other.
It´s not your resources that play the decisive role in your life. It is the relation between your resources and your environment that is decisive. Our life is not determined by the opportunities that exist. It is determined by the opportunities that we happen to pay any attention to.
Dreams are the stuff life is made up of. However, in the course of the years our ordinary, normal life makes us believe two things - we have no wings and if we had there´s no need for them.
If we ever had dreams, our normal life makes us shrink their size and soften their motivational power.
If - all of a sudden - you heard somebody say "That one is not a chicken. It´s an eagle!", would know that it is you the words refer to?
The world of bits is digital. It is an either-or world. In that world you are either a chicken or an eagle.
However, there is another world of qubits. Instead of either-or, it is governed by and.
In the world of qubits you are both a chicken and an eagle. Which of them "is on" depends on your desires and expectations and they are determined by your normal life, by the surroundings you have experience of.
Expecting any nice change lately?
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Surprises with Consequences
Have you ever been surprised by words - the different combinations of them?
Today I was listening to one of my top-class mentors on a cd. He said that this particular business suits perfectly to people who are ´ambitiously lazy´. Never before had I seen any positive connection between lazyness, ambition and successful business.
My mentor speaks English. Pero ahora cuando trato de explicártelo me encuentro en el centro de un lío linguistico en el nivel más alto - en el nivel de las lenguas, no solo en el del las palabras de una lengua. Now that I´m trying to explain to you what the odd-word-combination surprise feels like - do all surprises feel the same anyway? - I find myself in an upper level conflict, in a conflict between two languages, not only in one of the words of one language. Additionally none of those languages is my native tongue.
So far, two surprises on two levels.
For me English is for working and for various matter-of-facts of life. In that respect I have been very priviledged in life. Had I been born a year before, I would have learnt German at school. That was normal in those days. Among later generations knowing English has become self-evident, because our television programmes are subtitled.
One of the values of subtitles becomes visible when your pre-school children run out into the garden to you to ask what this or that means in their native tongue and then repeat something they have heard on tv in English. Another value of the subtitles is that children learn to read their own native tongue immediately when there is nobody to read the subtitles for them.
Summa summarum - subtitled tv has a solid positive impact on the national economy of a nation, especially when the two laguages are as far apart from each other as Finnish and English are. What I mean by this is that English will not be able to eat up Finnish without us being able to see what is happening. Finnish well never become a dialect of English. It will exist as an independet language as far as there are people who want to speak it, in other words until the year 3702 (cf. my text 11th of April).
Speaking English is more or less normal now. Very many Finns have the irritating habit of dropping in English words and idioms no matter with whom and about what they are speaking. There is a social pressure to know English much enough, on one hand to do dropping in, and on the other hand not to feel anyhow disturbed by the feelings of social isolation, if you do not know enough English to understand other people´s drop-ins.
Having reached something you might have lost something else. The knowledge of German has now become rare.
Approaching a third suprise on the third level.
We were sitting in a café in Helsinki. It was Christmas time. I felt content and relaxed after all driving and shopping. It was as if I had been wrapped in the lively talk around the table, not paying any attention to what was actually said. We Finns have a special talent of feeling happy, although keeping silent and socially unreachable when in company.
When you are among other Finns nobody pays any attention to your silence, provided there are at least two people in the group voluntarily taking the responsibility of uttering something insignificant every now and then.
But it was not a group of Finns now. It was a group of active and intelligent Spanish speaking young adults. All of a sudden I was woken up. The wrapping was opened. Lorena asked me in her beautifully rational and enthusiastic way: "What do you think about this?"
It was as if she had put a beautiful, fresh-baked and nicely smelling ham in the middle of the table. I had the smell. I saw that everybody around me admired what they saw, but I myself could not see anything. I had no idea what I was supposed to take part in. - My daughter did her best to save the situation.
Just at present I have a surprise ham on the table. A business opportunity in Spain. Por eso me estoy cambiando la cabeza. Para poder actuar en español necesito una identidad apropiada en español. Después de un rato en vez de meter palabras sueltas del inglés a la habla normal, voy a drop in castellano.
It is highly probable that various third level surprises will not only change your own life, but also the life of some other people. The prerequisite for major changes in life is called identity work. It is work, but finding out about the surprise is also fun. It makes you feel curious about your long and short-term future. They also say that people who do not have alternatives change quickly.
Have you ever coldly calculated how many options you have in your life?
By what means do you make them feasible?
Today I was listening to one of my top-class mentors on a cd. He said that this particular business suits perfectly to people who are ´ambitiously lazy´. Never before had I seen any positive connection between lazyness, ambition and successful business.
My mentor speaks English. Pero ahora cuando trato de explicártelo me encuentro en el centro de un lío linguistico en el nivel más alto - en el nivel de las lenguas, no solo en el del las palabras de una lengua. Now that I´m trying to explain to you what the odd-word-combination surprise feels like - do all surprises feel the same anyway? - I find myself in an upper level conflict, in a conflict between two languages, not only in one of the words of one language. Additionally none of those languages is my native tongue.
So far, two surprises on two levels.
For me English is for working and for various matter-of-facts of life. In that respect I have been very priviledged in life. Had I been born a year before, I would have learnt German at school. That was normal in those days. Among later generations knowing English has become self-evident, because our television programmes are subtitled.
One of the values of subtitles becomes visible when your pre-school children run out into the garden to you to ask what this or that means in their native tongue and then repeat something they have heard on tv in English. Another value of the subtitles is that children learn to read their own native tongue immediately when there is nobody to read the subtitles for them.
Summa summarum - subtitled tv has a solid positive impact on the national economy of a nation, especially when the two laguages are as far apart from each other as Finnish and English are. What I mean by this is that English will not be able to eat up Finnish without us being able to see what is happening. Finnish well never become a dialect of English. It will exist as an independet language as far as there are people who want to speak it, in other words until the year 3702 (cf. my text 11th of April).
Speaking English is more or less normal now. Very many Finns have the irritating habit of dropping in English words and idioms no matter with whom and about what they are speaking. There is a social pressure to know English much enough, on one hand to do dropping in, and on the other hand not to feel anyhow disturbed by the feelings of social isolation, if you do not know enough English to understand other people´s drop-ins.
Having reached something you might have lost something else. The knowledge of German has now become rare.
Approaching a third suprise on the third level.
We were sitting in a café in Helsinki. It was Christmas time. I felt content and relaxed after all driving and shopping. It was as if I had been wrapped in the lively talk around the table, not paying any attention to what was actually said. We Finns have a special talent of feeling happy, although keeping silent and socially unreachable when in company.
When you are among other Finns nobody pays any attention to your silence, provided there are at least two people in the group voluntarily taking the responsibility of uttering something insignificant every now and then.
But it was not a group of Finns now. It was a group of active and intelligent Spanish speaking young adults. All of a sudden I was woken up. The wrapping was opened. Lorena asked me in her beautifully rational and enthusiastic way: "What do you think about this?"
It was as if she had put a beautiful, fresh-baked and nicely smelling ham in the middle of the table. I had the smell. I saw that everybody around me admired what they saw, but I myself could not see anything. I had no idea what I was supposed to take part in. - My daughter did her best to save the situation.
Just at present I have a surprise ham on the table. A business opportunity in Spain. Por eso me estoy cambiando la cabeza. Para poder actuar en español necesito una identidad apropiada en español. Después de un rato en vez de meter palabras sueltas del inglés a la habla normal, voy a drop in castellano.
It is highly probable that various third level surprises will not only change your own life, but also the life of some other people. The prerequisite for major changes in life is called identity work. It is work, but finding out about the surprise is also fun. It makes you feel curious about your long and short-term future. They also say that people who do not have alternatives change quickly.
Have you ever coldly calculated how many options you have in your life?
By what means do you make them feasible?
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Sunshine and Stomach Ulcers
"The first sentence of a novel needs to construct a picture." (Leo Tolstoy)
I have a book consisting of the first sentences in 200 novels. Those books have been published in 1954-1986. When I got the book I thought it would be a treasure. It hasn´t been. I find it very irritating to be able to read the first five lines of a world-famous book and ...
All of a sudden there is nothing more.
The opposite page repeats the same drop out.
And the following.
When now telling you about this I realise that practically all of those 200 books have been written by men: Alberto, Amos, Kurt, John, Ernest, Yashar, Graham, Aleksander, Günter, William, Niko, Jevgeni, Wolfgang, Italo, Saul, Zharia, Ladislav, Yasunari, Wole etc.
When really searching I find three women Alice, Toni and Francoise. Maybe there are more of them, but anyhow it seems that 95 per cent of the influential authors of those days were men. Men must have a special talent for literary expression.
In my childhood men had several gene-bound talents that women did not have. Men composed music, played in symphony orchestras, made laws, run organizations and they even knew how to operate the clutch pedal of the car.
During my life time some of these genes have undergone mutations. We have important female composers. One of the most famous Finnish female composers is Kaija Saariaho. She is not the only one. Women play in symphony orchestras. They also conduct them. Susanna Mälkki, is one example of those ladies. Women are active in Finnish and European politics as well as in international conflict resolution.
Maybe the genes started changing when the women in my mother´s generation learned to drive car and used the clutch pedal, too.
I just wonder if the number of women authors has increased since 1986.
It´s now the evening of the fifth sunny and warm day of this summer. The sun is setting. The night will be short, but it is now dark. Maybe you wonder if it is normal in Finland to continuously refer to the ratio daylight and darkness in the way I do. You may even think it to be as embarassing as being able to read just the first five lines of a novel. Perhaps I had better add a few lines more.
I have told you about Midsummer and what it means to be going towards it, the days getting longer and longer. Now we are going towards the shorter and shorter days. I need not tell you anything more about that because somebody else has already done it. It is a pitty the following text has not been published in English. The name of the book in Spanish is Delicioso suicidio en grupo (ISBN: 978-84-339-7120-3, Finnish original Suloinen joukkoitsemurha). The author is Arto Paasilinna. He is a man, which does not make the text bad at all. If you might ever get interested in Finnish men, Paasilinna might give you an idea what is to be expected in the long run, when you start hearing the other one snoring at night...
"El enemigo más poderoso de los finlandeses es la oscuridad, la apatia sin fin. La melancolía flota sobre el desgraciado pueblo y durante miles de años lo ha mantenido bajo su yugo con tal fuerza, que el alma de éste ha terminado por volverse tenebrosa y grave. Tal es el peso de la gongoja, que muchos finlandeses ven la muerte como única salida a su angustia. Una mente taciturna es un enemigo aún más encarnizado y temible que la propia Union Sovietica.
Sin embargo, el finlandés es un pueblo de guerreros. Todo, menos rendirse. Una y otra vez se alza en rebelión contra el tirano
La Noche de San Juan, la fiesta de la luz y la alegría que marca el solsticio de verano, es para los finlandeses una descomunal batalla en la que, de común acuerdo y uniendo sus fuerzas, intentan derrotar a la melancolía que los corroe. Todo el pueblo se pone en pie de guerra: /.../"
Si te interesa saber más de lo que es normal en Finlandia y que no, vale la pena buscar éste libro por Arto Paasilinna. Leyéndolo vas a participar en un seminario de suicidiología en Helsinki, vas a conocer al criador de renos Uula Lismanki, al aguatragedias Seppo Sorjonen, al capitán en dique seco Mikko Heikkinen etc. Tambíen vas a viajar por todo Finlandia y al extranjero. Y sobre todo, vas a aprender dónde ponemos los limites de la normalidad en éste país.
It is a pitty this book has not been translated into English. You can easily find Arto Paasilinna in Spanish, French, German and Italian, in Swedish of course, but not in English. Maybe the sense of humour in Britain and the rest of the Anglo-American world is too sofisticated to cover the new-potatoes-dill-and-herring attitude towards life typical to Arto Paasilinna and the picaresque novel.
If you read in English, you may test your sense of humour reading The Year of the Hare (ISBN: 0-7206-1017-6, Finnish original Jäniksen vuosi) by the same author. The publisher has considered it important to add an explanative title on its cover: A picaresque novel with an ecological theme.
This is how it starts:
"Two harassed men were driving down a lane. The setting sun was paining their eyes through the dusty windscreen. It was midsummer, but the landscape on this sandy road was slipping past their weary eyes unnoticed; the beauty of the Finnish evening was lost on them both.
They were a journalist and a photographer, out on an assignment: two dissatisfied, cynical men, getting on for middle age. The hopes of their youth had not been realized, far from it. They were husbands, deceiving and deceived; stomach ulcers were on the way for both of them; and many other worries filled their days.
They´d just been wrangling. Should they drive back to Helsinki or spend the night in Heinola? Now they weren´t speaking.
They drove through the lovely summer evening hunched, self-absorbed as two mindless crustaceans, not even noticing how wrethced their cantankerousness was. /.../"
Sometimes we need courage to see the life as it is - full of choices. Paasilinna makes you see choices which normally remain undetected.
"La Finlandia intera entrava nella stagione estiva. La acque si erano liberate, gli umani risvegliati. Il sole splendeva raggiante, una brezza leggera turbinava nell´aria. Dalle parti di Lestijärvi, in campagna, una madre di familia sfornava brioche alla canella, a Kokkola, sulla costa, un automobilista ubriaco provocava un incidente mortale. Insomma, era cominciata l´estate." (Lo smemorato di Tapiola (ISBN: 88-7091-098-9, Finnish original Elämä lyhyt, Rytkönen pitkä).
The first sentence needs to make a picture. If there are just five lines of the text available, we have all reason to feel disappointed. How the story will continue is very much up to you. It depends more on the courage you have than on anything else. If there was a dream in the in the beginning, it was a lively and tempting picture. What was it like? What would be the first step to make your dream become true?
Long ago I got a dream - or the dream got me. I wanted to have some business in Spain. Now it seems that this dream will become true. To be able to share the dream with my friends there I need to brush up my Spanish. Just at present this is the first step.
It is funny, but Juan José Millás has a vocabulary I need not stumble with. When reading Paasilinna I have to use a dictionary. Obviously the world he describes is not reachable by academic concepts, which might be one more recommendation to read him.
I have a book consisting of the first sentences in 200 novels. Those books have been published in 1954-1986. When I got the book I thought it would be a treasure. It hasn´t been. I find it very irritating to be able to read the first five lines of a world-famous book and ...
All of a sudden there is nothing more.
The opposite page repeats the same drop out.
And the following.
When now telling you about this I realise that practically all of those 200 books have been written by men: Alberto, Amos, Kurt, John, Ernest, Yashar, Graham, Aleksander, Günter, William, Niko, Jevgeni, Wolfgang, Italo, Saul, Zharia, Ladislav, Yasunari, Wole etc.
When really searching I find three women Alice, Toni and Francoise. Maybe there are more of them, but anyhow it seems that 95 per cent of the influential authors of those days were men. Men must have a special talent for literary expression.
In my childhood men had several gene-bound talents that women did not have. Men composed music, played in symphony orchestras, made laws, run organizations and they even knew how to operate the clutch pedal of the car.
During my life time some of these genes have undergone mutations. We have important female composers. One of the most famous Finnish female composers is Kaija Saariaho. She is not the only one. Women play in symphony orchestras. They also conduct them. Susanna Mälkki, is one example of those ladies. Women are active in Finnish and European politics as well as in international conflict resolution.
Maybe the genes started changing when the women in my mother´s generation learned to drive car and used the clutch pedal, too.
I just wonder if the number of women authors has increased since 1986.
It´s now the evening of the fifth sunny and warm day of this summer. The sun is setting. The night will be short, but it is now dark. Maybe you wonder if it is normal in Finland to continuously refer to the ratio daylight and darkness in the way I do. You may even think it to be as embarassing as being able to read just the first five lines of a novel. Perhaps I had better add a few lines more.
I have told you about Midsummer and what it means to be going towards it, the days getting longer and longer. Now we are going towards the shorter and shorter days. I need not tell you anything more about that because somebody else has already done it. It is a pitty the following text has not been published in English. The name of the book in Spanish is Delicioso suicidio en grupo (ISBN: 978-84-339-7120-3, Finnish original Suloinen joukkoitsemurha). The author is Arto Paasilinna. He is a man, which does not make the text bad at all. If you might ever get interested in Finnish men, Paasilinna might give you an idea what is to be expected in the long run, when you start hearing the other one snoring at night...
"El enemigo más poderoso de los finlandeses es la oscuridad, la apatia sin fin. La melancolía flota sobre el desgraciado pueblo y durante miles de años lo ha mantenido bajo su yugo con tal fuerza, que el alma de éste ha terminado por volverse tenebrosa y grave. Tal es el peso de la gongoja, que muchos finlandeses ven la muerte como única salida a su angustia. Una mente taciturna es un enemigo aún más encarnizado y temible que la propia Union Sovietica.
Sin embargo, el finlandés es un pueblo de guerreros. Todo, menos rendirse. Una y otra vez se alza en rebelión contra el tirano
La Noche de San Juan, la fiesta de la luz y la alegría que marca el solsticio de verano, es para los finlandeses una descomunal batalla en la que, de común acuerdo y uniendo sus fuerzas, intentan derrotar a la melancolía que los corroe. Todo el pueblo se pone en pie de guerra: /.../"
Si te interesa saber más de lo que es normal en Finlandia y que no, vale la pena buscar éste libro por Arto Paasilinna. Leyéndolo vas a participar en un seminario de suicidiología en Helsinki, vas a conocer al criador de renos Uula Lismanki, al aguatragedias Seppo Sorjonen, al capitán en dique seco Mikko Heikkinen etc. Tambíen vas a viajar por todo Finlandia y al extranjero. Y sobre todo, vas a aprender dónde ponemos los limites de la normalidad en éste país.
It is a pitty this book has not been translated into English. You can easily find Arto Paasilinna in Spanish, French, German and Italian, in Swedish of course, but not in English. Maybe the sense of humour in Britain and the rest of the Anglo-American world is too sofisticated to cover the new-potatoes-dill-and-herring attitude towards life typical to Arto Paasilinna and the picaresque novel.
If you read in English, you may test your sense of humour reading The Year of the Hare (ISBN: 0-7206-1017-6, Finnish original Jäniksen vuosi) by the same author. The publisher has considered it important to add an explanative title on its cover: A picaresque novel with an ecological theme.
This is how it starts:
"Two harassed men were driving down a lane. The setting sun was paining their eyes through the dusty windscreen. It was midsummer, but the landscape on this sandy road was slipping past their weary eyes unnoticed; the beauty of the Finnish evening was lost on them both.
They were a journalist and a photographer, out on an assignment: two dissatisfied, cynical men, getting on for middle age. The hopes of their youth had not been realized, far from it. They were husbands, deceiving and deceived; stomach ulcers were on the way for both of them; and many other worries filled their days.
They´d just been wrangling. Should they drive back to Helsinki or spend the night in Heinola? Now they weren´t speaking.
They drove through the lovely summer evening hunched, self-absorbed as two mindless crustaceans, not even noticing how wrethced their cantankerousness was. /.../"
Sometimes we need courage to see the life as it is - full of choices. Paasilinna makes you see choices which normally remain undetected.
"La Finlandia intera entrava nella stagione estiva. La acque si erano liberate, gli umani risvegliati. Il sole splendeva raggiante, una brezza leggera turbinava nell´aria. Dalle parti di Lestijärvi, in campagna, una madre di familia sfornava brioche alla canella, a Kokkola, sulla costa, un automobilista ubriaco provocava un incidente mortale. Insomma, era cominciata l´estate." (Lo smemorato di Tapiola (ISBN: 88-7091-098-9, Finnish original Elämä lyhyt, Rytkönen pitkä).
The first sentence needs to make a picture. If there are just five lines of the text available, we have all reason to feel disappointed. How the story will continue is very much up to you. It depends more on the courage you have than on anything else. If there was a dream in the in the beginning, it was a lively and tempting picture. What was it like? What would be the first step to make your dream become true?
Long ago I got a dream - or the dream got me. I wanted to have some business in Spain. Now it seems that this dream will become true. To be able to share the dream with my friends there I need to brush up my Spanish. Just at present this is the first step.
It is funny, but Juan José Millás has a vocabulary I need not stumble with. When reading Paasilinna I have to use a dictionary. Obviously the world he describes is not reachable by academic concepts, which might be one more recommendation to read him.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Janus-faced Imaginations
"How many words are there?" my son asks when we are driving to the kindergarten.
It is a French kidergarten, free of charge, because the French government pays for the teacher and the city of Tampere for the rent. Pascal and Nady, the teachers, are specialised in Montessory pedagogy. In other words, we have luxury in our life.
Anybody can get their children in there. Anyway, they don´t. The simple reason is that luxury does not look like luxury when it is too near and too easy to reach. It is normal and normality can make things invisible and difficult to detect.
When a child starts wondering how many words there are, it is likely that he is learning to identify differences that make a difference as Gregory Bateson says.
"Imagination is strange. Think of Bill Watterson (the creator of Calvin and Hobbes), for instance. He must have Bill Watterson´s imagination and he must also have the imagination Calvin has." my son says in the car another day.
Obviously the car was an ideal place for deep thinking and sharing ideas. At least it was a place where the next occurence did not immediately wipe out the ideas talked about. They had time to become registered and remembered.
Once more we were on our 15-minute drive to the French kindergarten. My son asks:
"Mother, do you know what you should do when you feel really bad?"
"No."
"You should spread it as wide as possible."
"That sounds interesting."
"Yes, that is what Calvin says we should do."
If you ever have children buy them Legos and read them Calvin and Hobbes. Intelligent children are fun when they are small and a challenge when they grow up. When grown-up they make choices that inevitably make you wonder if they use their intelligence reasonably.
I do not mean that we should be overly rational all the time. I mean that it is extremely easy to seriously mess up one´s life for short-term benefits. Life will offer much more than we first believe possible. Being intelligent, obstinate and in a hurry can result in an accumulation of unnecessary life burden.
Little children think clearly. I do not know what my children were doing. I just overheard them: "There you have a problem." my son states in amatter-of-fact way.
"How are you going to solve it?" he asks.
"With rhetoric and reason." my daughter says without the slightest hesitation.
Her method is perfect. The only problem is that there are people who are not reachable either by means of rhetoric or by reason. God save us from them. May he keep them just rare anomalies that do not disturb what is normal.
Bill Watterson´s imagination came to my mind when I read Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann
(Finnish edition Murha laitumella). Maybe you should not read how the book has been presented. I knew practically nothing about it beforehand. It had never occured to me that the sheep really must have an eye on us human beings. If they didn´t, they would not get along in life.
In Spain my friends have sheep that are taken care of by a couple of shepherds. In Scotland I have seen sheep taken care of by dogs only. I know a sheep shearer from New Zealand. So far we are not personal friends, but maybe one day. He is a very entertaining and highly appreciated organisational trainer. Perhaps, his skill to share information and experience with his audience has its origins in the intelligence and imagination of the sheep he has shorn.
As sheep seem to smuggle their way into this text it is well worth mentioning a book I read in winter. It is Bulibasha King of the Gypsies by Witi Ihimaera (ISBN: 0-14-025432-3). It is an introduction to a world you may never have known to exist.
Life is more or less the same anywhere where people live - and anyhow - there are differences that make a difference. And there are people who are able to describe those differences to us. It is luxury, especially if you think what ambitious writing means in practice. I just finished reading El mundo by Juan José Millas (ISBN:978-84-08-07596-7).
He says "... escritura abre y cauteriza al mismo tiempo las heridas." Writing simultaneuously opens and heals wounds.
Millas also describes how he as a child, by chance, found out what happens to people when they have died:
"Los muertos vivían en otro barrio, pues. Había un barrio ocupado por ellos." ... "Las calles, en aquel lugar, estaban empedradas (en mi barrio, la mayoría eran de tierra) y los edificios, altos y distinguidos, tenían en sus bajos tiendas cuyos escaparates no podías dejar de mirar." There was a district in his town - Madrid - where the dead people lived. It was almost like the district where Millás himself lived, but not exactly.
The secret of rich and luxurious life is hidden into the concept "exactly alike, just a little different."
The origin of the differences that make a difference lies somewhere outside ´you´. You need somebody else to mark out the differences that make a difference. Having been marked, we tend to think that it was me who found it. It is just that shared experiences become our personal experiences and what are you able to own if not your experiences...
Writing is solitary work. People who read lead a priviledged life. They are never lonely, for instance.
We all are lucky to have so many words that can be combined in so many ways to point out so many slight differences that may construct new experiences.
At eleven-thirty I had to put on the lights. Nights are getting dark again. So far the summer has been cold, but beautiful. This is quite normal, athough we would prefer having some hot weather sometime, too. Not for too long, just the normal 11 days a year. So far we have had just two of them.
If you live in Madrid, just look around to see whether your barrio es un barrio de los vivos o de los muertos. The difference might be a bit difficult to detect at the first sight, but I´m sure you´ll learn to pick up the real differences that make a difference.
It is a French kidergarten, free of charge, because the French government pays for the teacher and the city of Tampere for the rent. Pascal and Nady, the teachers, are specialised in Montessory pedagogy. In other words, we have luxury in our life.
Anybody can get their children in there. Anyway, they don´t. The simple reason is that luxury does not look like luxury when it is too near and too easy to reach. It is normal and normality can make things invisible and difficult to detect.
When a child starts wondering how many words there are, it is likely that he is learning to identify differences that make a difference as Gregory Bateson says.
"Imagination is strange. Think of Bill Watterson (the creator of Calvin and Hobbes), for instance. He must have Bill Watterson´s imagination and he must also have the imagination Calvin has." my son says in the car another day.
Obviously the car was an ideal place for deep thinking and sharing ideas. At least it was a place where the next occurence did not immediately wipe out the ideas talked about. They had time to become registered and remembered.
Once more we were on our 15-minute drive to the French kindergarten. My son asks:
"Mother, do you know what you should do when you feel really bad?"
"No."
"You should spread it as wide as possible."
"That sounds interesting."
"Yes, that is what Calvin says we should do."
If you ever have children buy them Legos and read them Calvin and Hobbes. Intelligent children are fun when they are small and a challenge when they grow up. When grown-up they make choices that inevitably make you wonder if they use their intelligence reasonably.
I do not mean that we should be overly rational all the time. I mean that it is extremely easy to seriously mess up one´s life for short-term benefits. Life will offer much more than we first believe possible. Being intelligent, obstinate and in a hurry can result in an accumulation of unnecessary life burden.
Little children think clearly. I do not know what my children were doing. I just overheard them: "There you have a problem." my son states in amatter-of-fact way.
"How are you going to solve it?" he asks.
"With rhetoric and reason." my daughter says without the slightest hesitation.
Her method is perfect. The only problem is that there are people who are not reachable either by means of rhetoric or by reason. God save us from them. May he keep them just rare anomalies that do not disturb what is normal.
Bill Watterson´s imagination came to my mind when I read Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann
(Finnish edition Murha laitumella). Maybe you should not read how the book has been presented. I knew practically nothing about it beforehand. It had never occured to me that the sheep really must have an eye on us human beings. If they didn´t, they would not get along in life.
In Spain my friends have sheep that are taken care of by a couple of shepherds. In Scotland I have seen sheep taken care of by dogs only. I know a sheep shearer from New Zealand. So far we are not personal friends, but maybe one day. He is a very entertaining and highly appreciated organisational trainer. Perhaps, his skill to share information and experience with his audience has its origins in the intelligence and imagination of the sheep he has shorn.
As sheep seem to smuggle their way into this text it is well worth mentioning a book I read in winter. It is Bulibasha King of the Gypsies by Witi Ihimaera (ISBN: 0-14-025432-3). It is an introduction to a world you may never have known to exist.
Life is more or less the same anywhere where people live - and anyhow - there are differences that make a difference. And there are people who are able to describe those differences to us. It is luxury, especially if you think what ambitious writing means in practice. I just finished reading El mundo by Juan José Millas (ISBN:978-84-08-07596-7).
He says "... escritura abre y cauteriza al mismo tiempo las heridas." Writing simultaneuously opens and heals wounds.
Millas also describes how he as a child, by chance, found out what happens to people when they have died:
"Los muertos vivían en otro barrio, pues. Había un barrio ocupado por ellos." ... "Las calles, en aquel lugar, estaban empedradas (en mi barrio, la mayoría eran de tierra) y los edificios, altos y distinguidos, tenían en sus bajos tiendas cuyos escaparates no podías dejar de mirar." There was a district in his town - Madrid - where the dead people lived. It was almost like the district where Millás himself lived, but not exactly.
The secret of rich and luxurious life is hidden into the concept "exactly alike, just a little different."
The origin of the differences that make a difference lies somewhere outside ´you´. You need somebody else to mark out the differences that make a difference. Having been marked, we tend to think that it was me who found it. It is just that shared experiences become our personal experiences and what are you able to own if not your experiences...
Writing is solitary work. People who read lead a priviledged life. They are never lonely, for instance.
We all are lucky to have so many words that can be combined in so many ways to point out so many slight differences that may construct new experiences.
At eleven-thirty I had to put on the lights. Nights are getting dark again. So far the summer has been cold, but beautiful. This is quite normal, athough we would prefer having some hot weather sometime, too. Not for too long, just the normal 11 days a year. So far we have had just two of them.
If you live in Madrid, just look around to see whether your barrio es un barrio de los vivos o de los muertos. The difference might be a bit difficult to detect at the first sight, but I´m sure you´ll learn to pick up the real differences that make a difference.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Where does God´s Home End?
"World never comes to an end - if it comes, it will end on the very point where God´s home starts, just exactly at the fence."
World has not come to an end. In the forests blue flowers (hepatica triloba) came out first, after them the white ones (wood sorrel, oxalis acetocella and may lily, mianthemum bifolium) and then the yellow ones (buttercup, ranunculaceae). They went quickly by, as they usually do. If you do not go into forests a couple of times weekly, the next opportunity to see them will be next year.
I told my daughter that the apple trees will soon have blossomed. "Why didn´t you tell me before. I would have liked to see them."
The Finnish spring-summer goes rushing by. To me it is the most enjoyable time of the year. You know that every tomorrow will be longer than today - until Midsummer.
Days, nights, apple trees and Midsummer roses have followed their yearly routines. Bees haven´t. It was strange not to hear them humming in the blossoming apple trees. It was cold, but the Midsummer roses which come out a couple of weeks later were equally quiet. I thought it was warm enough for bees to be seen and heard then. I was worried.
Being in a hurry it is easy to forget that Nature is not just stimuli to our eyes. It is something that smells, tastes, bites, tickles and makes noises. If any one of those chracteristics is missing, we need to stop to think. Somebody has said that if bees disappear, human beings will follow in four years´time.
Bees have built a hive somewhere inside the wall above my front door. Going out I stop listening if they send any messages. Today nothing was to be heard. It is evening, about nine o´clock. My kitchen faces to the north. Just now it is sunlit, which only happens around Midsummer. Bees are still working busily in the garden. It is their normal life at this time of the year.
Swedish historian Peter Englund has written essays The History of Silence (original title Tystnadens historia och andra assäer, Finnish translation Hiljaisuuden historia, ISBN: 951-0-29417-9). I wish I could more often find books like that.
I remembered the book while mowing the lawn and taking up the wildest weeds. Some time ago I heard that the gardens around the typical Finnish 1950´s-houses need not be overly decorated. That was not done in the fifties. The after-war generation worked hard to get the country properly going on. They had no extra time to spend in the garden. Neither could they afford buying all possible plants that we now get from Holland and elsewhere. Apples, currants, raspberies and gooseberrie grew in their gardens without needing any special attention. Potatoes, carrots, dill and radish were grown and they had to be properly taken care of.
Now people can choose between ambitious gardening or just having a lawn. My choice is just the lawn - and I know the British would not call it any proper lawn. It is just a wild, green collection of grass, clover and dandelions.
Rain was starting to fall. First came the individual drops. I could hear how they met the foliage of the old apple trees. It was as if they had been whispering some secrets to them.
Peter Englund starts his book: "I have heard it snowing." "Olen kuullut lumen satavan."
I heard one rain drop, then another one, and that one followed by a couple of more...
Peter Englund reminds us that in the old days wind, rain and birds singing were not just insignificant background noises. They carried messages that needed interpretation. Southern winds brought illness; northern winds intensified depression and made people feel hungry; heavy, icy winds after the 6th of December promised good harvest; if the heavy, icy winds started blowing on a Christmas Eve, the king was going to die.
In those days wind was not listened to because of the noise it made. It was listened to because it had something to say. The same applies to the bees and Midsummer roses today. If you do not hear bees and other insects in and among their flowers, the silence has something to say.
I have been writing about expertise, knowledge and power lately. The topic needs to be crumbled. Otherwise it is too heavy. It needs to be decorated with stories and anecdotes. Often the stories about power are stories about force and cruelty. I have read some history.
Jaan Kross a remarkable Estonian writer. He writes about Estonia during and after the second world war, as well as about his own experiences in the Russian concentration camps in Siberia. The texts have been published between 1984 - 1998. If you ever get hold of them, you have seen a jaguar in the jungle. In other words, having read them your world will have changed. The name of the Finnish collection is Halleluja (ISBN: 951-0-25615-3). I sincerely hope that the collection has been translated into English as well.
Sometimes we go on asking though the answers have already been given. Guido Knopp has written a book called Hitlers Kinder (Hitlerin lapset ISBN: 951-20-7013-8). We often emphasize that everyone has a choice. Having read Hitlers Kinder you might feel tempted to reconsider what you think of the choices in Germany in the 1930´s.
One more deep dive into the history has been King Leopold´s Ghost by Adam Hochschildt (Kuningas Leopoldin haamu, ISBN: 951-31-2850-4). Visiting the Heart of Darkness is more than unpleasant. The only thing giving us some hope is that among us there are always one or two individuals who are brave enough to find out what is really taking place. In the very beginning there may be only one person who is ready to fight to find out the truth.
Peter Englund writes about heroism. Real heroes face death and they risk their own life for others. However, our willingness to find heroes makes the majority of us blind and lazy. History proves that many heroes have been authentic rascals and evildoers.
Why do we learn that just afterwards? It is because of power. Real power is the power to define where God´s home is and what its fence is made of.
Post script If you have read The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, you know what ´the fence´ refers to. The reference to the end of the world and God´s home I owe to seven-year-old Rasmus.
World has not come to an end. In the forests blue flowers (hepatica triloba) came out first, after them the white ones (wood sorrel, oxalis acetocella and may lily, mianthemum bifolium) and then the yellow ones (buttercup, ranunculaceae). They went quickly by, as they usually do. If you do not go into forests a couple of times weekly, the next opportunity to see them will be next year.
I told my daughter that the apple trees will soon have blossomed. "Why didn´t you tell me before. I would have liked to see them."
The Finnish spring-summer goes rushing by. To me it is the most enjoyable time of the year. You know that every tomorrow will be longer than today - until Midsummer.
Days, nights, apple trees and Midsummer roses have followed their yearly routines. Bees haven´t. It was strange not to hear them humming in the blossoming apple trees. It was cold, but the Midsummer roses which come out a couple of weeks later were equally quiet. I thought it was warm enough for bees to be seen and heard then. I was worried.
Being in a hurry it is easy to forget that Nature is not just stimuli to our eyes. It is something that smells, tastes, bites, tickles and makes noises. If any one of those chracteristics is missing, we need to stop to think. Somebody has said that if bees disappear, human beings will follow in four years´time.
Bees have built a hive somewhere inside the wall above my front door. Going out I stop listening if they send any messages. Today nothing was to be heard. It is evening, about nine o´clock. My kitchen faces to the north. Just now it is sunlit, which only happens around Midsummer. Bees are still working busily in the garden. It is their normal life at this time of the year.
Swedish historian Peter Englund has written essays The History of Silence (original title Tystnadens historia och andra assäer, Finnish translation Hiljaisuuden historia, ISBN: 951-0-29417-9). I wish I could more often find books like that.
I remembered the book while mowing the lawn and taking up the wildest weeds. Some time ago I heard that the gardens around the typical Finnish 1950´s-houses need not be overly decorated. That was not done in the fifties. The after-war generation worked hard to get the country properly going on. They had no extra time to spend in the garden. Neither could they afford buying all possible plants that we now get from Holland and elsewhere. Apples, currants, raspberies and gooseberrie grew in their gardens without needing any special attention. Potatoes, carrots, dill and radish were grown and they had to be properly taken care of.
Now people can choose between ambitious gardening or just having a lawn. My choice is just the lawn - and I know the British would not call it any proper lawn. It is just a wild, green collection of grass, clover and dandelions.
Rain was starting to fall. First came the individual drops. I could hear how they met the foliage of the old apple trees. It was as if they had been whispering some secrets to them.
Peter Englund starts his book: "I have heard it snowing." "Olen kuullut lumen satavan."
I heard one rain drop, then another one, and that one followed by a couple of more...
Peter Englund reminds us that in the old days wind, rain and birds singing were not just insignificant background noises. They carried messages that needed interpretation. Southern winds brought illness; northern winds intensified depression and made people feel hungry; heavy, icy winds after the 6th of December promised good harvest; if the heavy, icy winds started blowing on a Christmas Eve, the king was going to die.
In those days wind was not listened to because of the noise it made. It was listened to because it had something to say. The same applies to the bees and Midsummer roses today. If you do not hear bees and other insects in and among their flowers, the silence has something to say.
I have been writing about expertise, knowledge and power lately. The topic needs to be crumbled. Otherwise it is too heavy. It needs to be decorated with stories and anecdotes. Often the stories about power are stories about force and cruelty. I have read some history.
Jaan Kross a remarkable Estonian writer. He writes about Estonia during and after the second world war, as well as about his own experiences in the Russian concentration camps in Siberia. The texts have been published between 1984 - 1998. If you ever get hold of them, you have seen a jaguar in the jungle. In other words, having read them your world will have changed. The name of the Finnish collection is Halleluja (ISBN: 951-0-25615-3). I sincerely hope that the collection has been translated into English as well.
Sometimes we go on asking though the answers have already been given. Guido Knopp has written a book called Hitlers Kinder (Hitlerin lapset ISBN: 951-20-7013-8). We often emphasize that everyone has a choice. Having read Hitlers Kinder you might feel tempted to reconsider what you think of the choices in Germany in the 1930´s.
One more deep dive into the history has been King Leopold´s Ghost by Adam Hochschildt (Kuningas Leopoldin haamu, ISBN: 951-31-2850-4). Visiting the Heart of Darkness is more than unpleasant. The only thing giving us some hope is that among us there are always one or two individuals who are brave enough to find out what is really taking place. In the very beginning there may be only one person who is ready to fight to find out the truth.
Peter Englund writes about heroism. Real heroes face death and they risk their own life for others. However, our willingness to find heroes makes the majority of us blind and lazy. History proves that many heroes have been authentic rascals and evildoers.
Why do we learn that just afterwards? It is because of power. Real power is the power to define where God´s home is and what its fence is made of.
Post script If you have read The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, you know what ´the fence´ refers to. The reference to the end of the world and God´s home I owe to seven-year-old Rasmus.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Human Mind and Sumerian Gods
Sumerians thought that the world is governed by the council of seven gods: Sun, Moon, Sky, Fresh water, Salty water and Storm. The mightiest of them was Storm. This council gathered the first day of every year to decide what the new year will be like, what will be possible and what not.
Some time ago I had a nightmare that woke me up. I was at school, happy and content. Doing the things that I enjoyed doing and simultaneously pushing aside getting prepaired for the maths finals.
When I went to school we had a matriculation exam. It was a real once-in-a-lifetime event that affected your coming seventy, eighty years of life. The exam could not be repeated nor the results made any better.
Every now and then this nightmare repeats itself. I´m totally happy, but every now and then I remember that the exam is approaching. Anyhow I do nothing. Then all of a sudden I realise that it is too late. I do not have the slightest possibility to get prepaired. If there´s no maths, there will be nothing else either. The only thing that I have left is to tell my maths teacher that I have to give up. There will be no matriculation exam nor any graduating for me. - This is when I wake up. I realise that there is no more need for any matriculation exam. I have passed it long since. Life is all right. What a relief!
It is interesting how our mind works. At least to me it seems that there are two alternative interpretations for this dream. One is that I´m badly neglecting to see that there is a real danger approaching. The other one is to realize that... I have difficulties in constructing this second alternative. Sometimes it flashes in my mind, but when I try to catch a hold of it to write it down, it disappears. Maybe, there´s just the first alternative, the danger.
It is now eleven o´clock p.m. I can still see that the sun is setting slowly. The last rays are reflected on sky which will be lit by the moon in awhile. Long, sunny, fresh and beautiful spring days are here. Leaves grow rapidly. Narcissi and tulips are blossoming.
This is the best time to visit Finland. Even the most pessimistic people won´t say yet that the autumn will start approaching soon, meaning that after Midsummer the days won´t get any longer. So far every day is longer than the previous one.
They say that thinking about time equals thinking about death. The days being exceptionally short or unusually long makes you think about time. In winter it is cold and dark at four-five. You need a some self-discipline and social pressure to feel enthusiastic about taking any initiative. In summer you can do things without inner or outer obligations, voluntarily and enjoyably.
I recently read Songs of the Gorilla Nation. My Journey through Autism by Dawn Prince-Hughes ( Finnish edition ISBN: 952-5534-20-0). I knew practically nothing about autism and the Asperger syndrome before that. The book is worth reading.
What you might gain in reading the book is that you learn to see normal human behaviour as one version of gorilla behaviour. I do not mean gorilla behaviour in the aggressive and stereo type sense, but in the sense of really caring and minding of each other.
Somebody thas said that caring is waiting rather than effort or tension or mobilisation of knowledge. Caring is a time-related concept. It means waiting. As a gorilla expert Prince-Hughes points out that as well.
People can have different versions of Asperger syndrome which means that they have the need to develop their own coping strategies to get on in life. Prince-Hughes describes hers. She ends up becoming a university professor.
She worked methodologically to reach her goal. One third of her time at the university she talked about her personal skills and abilities. The second third she talked about the work of her colleagues and their shared interests. The rest of the time she talked about current events and her own softened opinions about them. She also made it a rule for herself to remember to ask about other people´s interests.
Due to her special Asperger behaviour it was easy and automatic for her to control that all those topics really received their due time.
If we add to this knowledge what Guy Kawasaki tells about his communication habits, we have a special success formula. Kawasaki lists eight passions that make it possible for him to connect with anybody in the business world. The topics are Audi cars, Breitling watches, tinnitus/Ménièr´s disease, boxers (the dog breed), adopting children, London, digital photography, and Macintosh (text 29.6.2007) .
It´s obvious that you need to develop your own list of eight passions, but that should not be too demanding. You have tested them several times.
Now that we have tested experience of both the topics and the time required, we have at our disposal a recipe showing how normal life can be made even better. If the recipe does not work, we had perhaps better turn to the Sumerian gods.
Or what do you think - are your personal restrictions determined rather by your nightmares and fear for success, plus the fear for the work required, or are they determined by the Sumerian gods deciding what will be possible and what not?
If life is normal, is there any real need to make it even better?
Some time ago I had a nightmare that woke me up. I was at school, happy and content. Doing the things that I enjoyed doing and simultaneously pushing aside getting prepaired for the maths finals.
When I went to school we had a matriculation exam. It was a real once-in-a-lifetime event that affected your coming seventy, eighty years of life. The exam could not be repeated nor the results made any better.
Every now and then this nightmare repeats itself. I´m totally happy, but every now and then I remember that the exam is approaching. Anyhow I do nothing. Then all of a sudden I realise that it is too late. I do not have the slightest possibility to get prepaired. If there´s no maths, there will be nothing else either. The only thing that I have left is to tell my maths teacher that I have to give up. There will be no matriculation exam nor any graduating for me. - This is when I wake up. I realise that there is no more need for any matriculation exam. I have passed it long since. Life is all right. What a relief!
It is interesting how our mind works. At least to me it seems that there are two alternative interpretations for this dream. One is that I´m badly neglecting to see that there is a real danger approaching. The other one is to realize that... I have difficulties in constructing this second alternative. Sometimes it flashes in my mind, but when I try to catch a hold of it to write it down, it disappears. Maybe, there´s just the first alternative, the danger.
It is now eleven o´clock p.m. I can still see that the sun is setting slowly. The last rays are reflected on sky which will be lit by the moon in awhile. Long, sunny, fresh and beautiful spring days are here. Leaves grow rapidly. Narcissi and tulips are blossoming.
This is the best time to visit Finland. Even the most pessimistic people won´t say yet that the autumn will start approaching soon, meaning that after Midsummer the days won´t get any longer. So far every day is longer than the previous one.
They say that thinking about time equals thinking about death. The days being exceptionally short or unusually long makes you think about time. In winter it is cold and dark at four-five. You need a some self-discipline and social pressure to feel enthusiastic about taking any initiative. In summer you can do things without inner or outer obligations, voluntarily and enjoyably.
I recently read Songs of the Gorilla Nation. My Journey through Autism by Dawn Prince-Hughes ( Finnish edition ISBN: 952-5534-20-0). I knew practically nothing about autism and the Asperger syndrome before that. The book is worth reading.
What you might gain in reading the book is that you learn to see normal human behaviour as one version of gorilla behaviour. I do not mean gorilla behaviour in the aggressive and stereo type sense, but in the sense of really caring and minding of each other.
Somebody thas said that caring is waiting rather than effort or tension or mobilisation of knowledge. Caring is a time-related concept. It means waiting. As a gorilla expert Prince-Hughes points out that as well.
People can have different versions of Asperger syndrome which means that they have the need to develop their own coping strategies to get on in life. Prince-Hughes describes hers. She ends up becoming a university professor.
She worked methodologically to reach her goal. One third of her time at the university she talked about her personal skills and abilities. The second third she talked about the work of her colleagues and their shared interests. The rest of the time she talked about current events and her own softened opinions about them. She also made it a rule for herself to remember to ask about other people´s interests.
Due to her special Asperger behaviour it was easy and automatic for her to control that all those topics really received their due time.
If we add to this knowledge what Guy Kawasaki tells about his communication habits, we have a special success formula. Kawasaki lists eight passions that make it possible for him to connect with anybody in the business world. The topics are Audi cars, Breitling watches, tinnitus/Ménièr´s disease, boxers (the dog breed), adopting children, London, digital photography, and Macintosh (text 29.6.2007) .
It´s obvious that you need to develop your own list of eight passions, but that should not be too demanding. You have tested them several times.
Now that we have tested experience of both the topics and the time required, we have at our disposal a recipe showing how normal life can be made even better. If the recipe does not work, we had perhaps better turn to the Sumerian gods.
Or what do you think - are your personal restrictions determined rather by your nightmares and fear for success, plus the fear for the work required, or are they determined by the Sumerian gods deciding what will be possible and what not?
If life is normal, is there any real need to make it even better?
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Weight of Your Brain?
When the Russian author Turgenejev died in 1883 his brain was weighed and found to be exceptionally heavy - heavier than any other brain by that time. When the French author Anatole France died in 1924 his brain was weighed as well. It was found to be the lightest of all brains by then.
The brain of both of these two authors was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records and both of the records have been beaten since then.
Among the normal tinnitus there is a rhyme going on in my head: "If you always do what you´ve always done, you´ll always get what you´ve always gotten."
You need not be exceptionally intelligent to understand the logic of that rhyme. But understanding does not mean that you would change the situation accordingly. Changing one´s own habits must be one of the most challenging things in life. You might have set a goal, but anyhow you go on your normal daily life in the way you have always done.
In a seminar I met a couple who had built a solid, highly profitable business. The process from the decision to the end result had taken them five years. "In fact we did it in three years, but we needed two years to get ready for the activity." they explained.
Maybe it was the other way round - two years of doing and three years of active work - but it does not matter. The basic idea is still the same - you might have decided to reach something important and anyhow the concrete activities tend to somehow remain on the side-track. It is as if there were a threshold in front of the conscious changes in life. Why does this happen?
No doubt the goal itself needs to be clear. All goals have consequences. We may need time and energy to check them out. It is not enough for the goal to be morally and ethically correct. It must be ecologically correct as well, which means that it must not mess your own or anybody else´s life.
There must also be a clear connection between the goal and the activities leading to it. They are the daily activities that beat the path and make the goal become true. And it is exactly here that we have the continuous competition between the old habits and new activities. Normally the old routines win and the goal is in danger of becoming unreachable.
Some time ago I read the biography of Evita Peron (Barnes, J.: Evita, La biografía, ISBN: 84-473-1214-3). I know that there are different opinions about her, but nobody can deny that having made a decision, she did not need any threshold-time to start the action proper.
She quickly became the only person who, by then, had paid any attention to improving the living conditions of the poor people in Argentina. A clear indication of the impact of her work would be the number of hospitals before her and when she died. Sorry, I do not remember those figures just now. Just wait until I have read the book again...
Another interesting fact in Evita Peron´s life was that she never reached her primary goal. She wanted to be recognized and appreciated by the high society in her country. She never was. From the goal setting point of view this is due to the basic fact that we cannot set goals for other people. I cannot stop smoking for you and you cannot go jogging for me.
To gain somebody´s appreciation or love is not under your control. They also say that life would be easier if we could decide who we fall in love with. Well, as far as we know, Evita Peron made a very conscious decision to fall in love with Juan Peron and immediately informed him about her intention to marry him. She was an exceptional person in that respect as well. Burning goals really push obstacles by side.
Among all the goals you have set yourself, there are some that have the status qualification 1 A, which means that they get absolute preference among all possible choices you make daily. Do you recognize the specific features that make these goals so compelling for your brain? We continuously make choices of what to do next. Some things get preference, others drop out. How does your brain know what to prefer? How do you mark the steps leading to your goal 1 A so that the new routines get in and the old ones are pushed onto the side-track - and not vice versa?
Our preferences become our ambitions and passions. We want to do something in order to reach something else. Doing is under our control. At the beginning of the 15th century Cosimo de Medici wanted to have 200 books in his library. We do not know why he wanted to have them, but we know that he took the list to a bookshop in Florence and the bookshopper employed 45 scribes to copy them for him.
Ivan Sergejevitsh Turgenejev and Anatoli France wanted to write books. When you read them you will get an approximate idea why they wanted to do that. One of them had an exceptionally heavy brain while the brain of the other was exceptionally light. Obviously the size of the brain is not decisive. Decisive is how you use your brain in your normal life.
What will you do next? How does that help you reach your goal marked with the status qualification A1?
The brain of both of these two authors was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records and both of the records have been beaten since then.
Among the normal tinnitus there is a rhyme going on in my head: "If you always do what you´ve always done, you´ll always get what you´ve always gotten."
You need not be exceptionally intelligent to understand the logic of that rhyme. But understanding does not mean that you would change the situation accordingly. Changing one´s own habits must be one of the most challenging things in life. You might have set a goal, but anyhow you go on your normal daily life in the way you have always done.
In a seminar I met a couple who had built a solid, highly profitable business. The process from the decision to the end result had taken them five years. "In fact we did it in three years, but we needed two years to get ready for the activity." they explained.
Maybe it was the other way round - two years of doing and three years of active work - but it does not matter. The basic idea is still the same - you might have decided to reach something important and anyhow the concrete activities tend to somehow remain on the side-track. It is as if there were a threshold in front of the conscious changes in life. Why does this happen?
No doubt the goal itself needs to be clear. All goals have consequences. We may need time and energy to check them out. It is not enough for the goal to be morally and ethically correct. It must be ecologically correct as well, which means that it must not mess your own or anybody else´s life.
There must also be a clear connection between the goal and the activities leading to it. They are the daily activities that beat the path and make the goal become true. And it is exactly here that we have the continuous competition between the old habits and new activities. Normally the old routines win and the goal is in danger of becoming unreachable.
Some time ago I read the biography of Evita Peron (Barnes, J.: Evita, La biografía, ISBN: 84-473-1214-3). I know that there are different opinions about her, but nobody can deny that having made a decision, she did not need any threshold-time to start the action proper.
She quickly became the only person who, by then, had paid any attention to improving the living conditions of the poor people in Argentina. A clear indication of the impact of her work would be the number of hospitals before her and when she died. Sorry, I do not remember those figures just now. Just wait until I have read the book again...
Another interesting fact in Evita Peron´s life was that she never reached her primary goal. She wanted to be recognized and appreciated by the high society in her country. She never was. From the goal setting point of view this is due to the basic fact that we cannot set goals for other people. I cannot stop smoking for you and you cannot go jogging for me.
To gain somebody´s appreciation or love is not under your control. They also say that life would be easier if we could decide who we fall in love with. Well, as far as we know, Evita Peron made a very conscious decision to fall in love with Juan Peron and immediately informed him about her intention to marry him. She was an exceptional person in that respect as well. Burning goals really push obstacles by side.
Among all the goals you have set yourself, there are some that have the status qualification 1 A, which means that they get absolute preference among all possible choices you make daily. Do you recognize the specific features that make these goals so compelling for your brain? We continuously make choices of what to do next. Some things get preference, others drop out. How does your brain know what to prefer? How do you mark the steps leading to your goal 1 A so that the new routines get in and the old ones are pushed onto the side-track - and not vice versa?
Our preferences become our ambitions and passions. We want to do something in order to reach something else. Doing is under our control. At the beginning of the 15th century Cosimo de Medici wanted to have 200 books in his library. We do not know why he wanted to have them, but we know that he took the list to a bookshop in Florence and the bookshopper employed 45 scribes to copy them for him.
Ivan Sergejevitsh Turgenejev and Anatoli France wanted to write books. When you read them you will get an approximate idea why they wanted to do that. One of them had an exceptionally heavy brain while the brain of the other was exceptionally light. Obviously the size of the brain is not decisive. Decisive is how you use your brain in your normal life.
What will you do next? How does that help you reach your goal marked with the status qualification A1?
Friday, April 11, 2008
The Last Finn Eats Fish and Tomatoes
I have been writing short articles about time lately. So far their number is 24. I´m aiming at 40 and the goal looks totally possible. At least I want to believe so.
In this time-article process I have learned that the Mayas had a calendar that repeated itself every 260 years. All good and bad that happened 260 years ago would repeat itself now. If a calamity is to come it is waste of time (!) to try to stop it.
I also learned that the City of Assisi in Italy published their strategy on November 9th in 1210 and any Finnish city could copy that today in their effort to increase their prosperity.
However, from today´s perspective we can see one obvious mistake in the Assisi strategy. The City Fathers did not include caring for people in their concept of ´work´. They defined ´work´ as something that brings economic benefit to the town.
Just imagine what our present day would look like if caring for people had been included among the prosperity-bringing acitivities. The Assisi City Fathers left caring for the Church to do - and there it has remained. Just think what it would mean to appreciate caring for people as much as we appreciate producing paper making machines, for instance.
I also learned that the last Finn will die in the year 3702. It is a widowed old lady living in the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia. She has eaten a lot of fish and tomatoes and sung in a choir.
All Finnish-speaking Finns have died long ago, because we are gloomy, we avoid meeting people, we only sing when drunk, we try to avoid speaking Swedish, and we are pessimistic.
I personally like eating tomatoes and fish, but when writing those articles I often get caught by the dark and pessimistic idea that they will never be published, I´ll be bankrupt, and die before having learned Swedish well enough to speak it publicly.
Time is a social construction. I do not stop admiring us human beings - we are able to construct anything we need as a collective. As long as the Nature, heavenly bodies and gods controlled our time system, we were unable to organise our activities to produce anything systematic and precisely defined. But as soon as we changed the concept of time so that it became a neutral, evenly distributed, predictable and countable concept with a price tag on it, we were able to organise our activities to produce steam engines, locomotives, diesel cars, space travel, mobile phones, global banking, and 24-hour on-line currency speculation.
Having changed the concept of time, we can earnestly claim that time is money. Time has a price tag on it. You know the worth of your working hour as well as that of your neighbour´s. You also know that it is exactly the price of the individual hour that moves big factories from one continent to another. The price tag has a magnetic effect. It either pulls or pushes organisational activities world-wide. We also know that big enough magnets tend to be out of any human control.
But if you had a lot of money, what would you do with your time? I mean really much money.
I suppose that you lead normal life and that supposition leads to another - having enormous amounts of money you would be in a totally new and unfamiliar situation. In new, unfamilar situations people seldom know what to do. To be able to do anything we need role models. Luckily we know one really rich person - Bill Gates. What does he do?
Imagine Bill Gates walking in the street and seeing or dropping a piece of paper money on the ground. Of which value would the bill have to be so that it would be worth his time to stop and pick it up? We can count his average earning rate in dollars per second and we assume that it would take him four seconds to pick it up. In 1986 a five dollar bill would have been too small for him to bother with. Ten years ago, by 1998, a 10 000 dollar bill wasn´t worth trouble.
So the Bill Gates Wealth Index by Richard Florida reveals that being really rich you would not be picking up paper money from the streets.
What would you do instead? Eat tomatoes and sing in a choir? That is what the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnians here in Finland do. And that is why they feel happy and outlive us others...
In this time-article process I have learned that the Mayas had a calendar that repeated itself every 260 years. All good and bad that happened 260 years ago would repeat itself now. If a calamity is to come it is waste of time (!) to try to stop it.
I also learned that the City of Assisi in Italy published their strategy on November 9th in 1210 and any Finnish city could copy that today in their effort to increase their prosperity.
However, from today´s perspective we can see one obvious mistake in the Assisi strategy. The City Fathers did not include caring for people in their concept of ´work´. They defined ´work´ as something that brings economic benefit to the town.
Just imagine what our present day would look like if caring for people had been included among the prosperity-bringing acitivities. The Assisi City Fathers left caring for the Church to do - and there it has remained. Just think what it would mean to appreciate caring for people as much as we appreciate producing paper making machines, for instance.
I also learned that the last Finn will die in the year 3702. It is a widowed old lady living in the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia. She has eaten a lot of fish and tomatoes and sung in a choir.
All Finnish-speaking Finns have died long ago, because we are gloomy, we avoid meeting people, we only sing when drunk, we try to avoid speaking Swedish, and we are pessimistic.
I personally like eating tomatoes and fish, but when writing those articles I often get caught by the dark and pessimistic idea that they will never be published, I´ll be bankrupt, and die before having learned Swedish well enough to speak it publicly.
Time is a social construction. I do not stop admiring us human beings - we are able to construct anything we need as a collective. As long as the Nature, heavenly bodies and gods controlled our time system, we were unable to organise our activities to produce anything systematic and precisely defined. But as soon as we changed the concept of time so that it became a neutral, evenly distributed, predictable and countable concept with a price tag on it, we were able to organise our activities to produce steam engines, locomotives, diesel cars, space travel, mobile phones, global banking, and 24-hour on-line currency speculation.
Having changed the concept of time, we can earnestly claim that time is money. Time has a price tag on it. You know the worth of your working hour as well as that of your neighbour´s. You also know that it is exactly the price of the individual hour that moves big factories from one continent to another. The price tag has a magnetic effect. It either pulls or pushes organisational activities world-wide. We also know that big enough magnets tend to be out of any human control.
But if you had a lot of money, what would you do with your time? I mean really much money.
I suppose that you lead normal life and that supposition leads to another - having enormous amounts of money you would be in a totally new and unfamiliar situation. In new, unfamilar situations people seldom know what to do. To be able to do anything we need role models. Luckily we know one really rich person - Bill Gates. What does he do?
Imagine Bill Gates walking in the street and seeing or dropping a piece of paper money on the ground. Of which value would the bill have to be so that it would be worth his time to stop and pick it up? We can count his average earning rate in dollars per second and we assume that it would take him four seconds to pick it up. In 1986 a five dollar bill would have been too small for him to bother with. Ten years ago, by 1998, a 10 000 dollar bill wasn´t worth trouble.
So the Bill Gates Wealth Index by Richard Florida reveals that being really rich you would not be picking up paper money from the streets.
What would you do instead? Eat tomatoes and sing in a choir? That is what the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnians here in Finland do. And that is why they feel happy and outlive us others...
Friday, April 4, 2008
Your Personal Level of Happiness?
Have you ever been flooded over by life? Now I do not mean that you should have gone through any drastic and dramatic life changes. Neither do I mean feeling over-loaded. I mean normal days that somehow get filled up with comings and goings the combination of which rather resembles a cubistic painting than a Flemish still-life.
Today everything in this town has been framed by beautiful spring weather. Now we have light. Even after nine o´clock in the evening you can still see that light was present. Snow is melting rapidly. Going for a walk on the frozen lakes would be very risky. Skiing tracks in the forests won´t be back until next year.
Maybe the most memorable event today was a visit at my cousin´s. He has a big family. Their three and four-year-old sons were going out. If you have lived in the north, you know what it means to dress the children properly in winter. Often it takes time and effort. Sometimes you need to tell yourself that you are an adult person and you can decide to have good nerves.
"Imagine, every morning we need to find fourteen more or less similar pairs of socks." the boy´s mother laughed. She found two wellington boots - a blue one and a red one. "Are these all right?" she asked suggesting that they were a pair. The little one said simply "No." Finally one complete pair was found. All this happened without any signs of impatience and rush on either side.
"I´ll give you two euros, if you play with them here." mother said to the neighbour´s girl. The deal was done. We could talk business at the kitchen table.
Having come back the boys simply took off their clothes and went on with their games totally naked. "Our children start wearing clothes when they are five." their mother explained.
I wish I had been that kind of calm and non-rushing mother. I was not. I remember having been impatient and I certainly have rushed my children - and myself. I still keep on doing that. However, when children were small I tried to apologise in the evenings for all the obvious mistakes I had done during the day. Once having done that my daughter said: "Well, it´s all right. Anyway, it´s better to have a yelling mother than no mother at all." - All is relative and some things have a lasting effect.
Later in the evening the battery of my mobile phone went flat just when I was talking with my friends in Hungary. I had to wait for it to operate again. When a book catches your eye, you need to take it. Meanings of Life (ISBN: 0-89862-531-9) was sending special messages from the bookself. This is what I found in it:
"People believe that happiness depends on their immediate circumstances, and they often believe that changing the circumstances - as by getting out of an unhappy marriage - will bring about a major change in their level of happiness. But these beliefs appear to be wrong, or at least greatly exaggerated. Happiness remains fairly constant over the long run."
The author of Meanings of Life is Roy F. Baumeister. He cites research. A two-sentence summary of the adaption-level theory of happiness states that good and bad events have only a temporary effect on subjective feelings, which soon return to the baseline and people have different baselines. After any event, good or bad, happy people go back to being happy, while unhappy people go back to being unhappy.
Sometimes I feel worried about feeling worried. Once we were talking about things like that with teacher students. I said that to my mind the basic idea of the Christian religion is to liberate human beings from all worries and feeling worried is perhaps the biggest of all sins. "All sins are of the same size." somebody said. "One sin is not bigger or smaller than any other."
Well, we have t-shirts and blue jeans of various sizes, but would God really use scales and measures to determine the value of our shortcomings? Even that remains untold to us. You have to decide that yourself.
Today everything in this town has been framed by beautiful spring weather. Now we have light. Even after nine o´clock in the evening you can still see that light was present. Snow is melting rapidly. Going for a walk on the frozen lakes would be very risky. Skiing tracks in the forests won´t be back until next year.
Maybe the most memorable event today was a visit at my cousin´s. He has a big family. Their three and four-year-old sons were going out. If you have lived in the north, you know what it means to dress the children properly in winter. Often it takes time and effort. Sometimes you need to tell yourself that you are an adult person and you can decide to have good nerves.
"Imagine, every morning we need to find fourteen more or less similar pairs of socks." the boy´s mother laughed. She found two wellington boots - a blue one and a red one. "Are these all right?" she asked suggesting that they were a pair. The little one said simply "No." Finally one complete pair was found. All this happened without any signs of impatience and rush on either side.
"I´ll give you two euros, if you play with them here." mother said to the neighbour´s girl. The deal was done. We could talk business at the kitchen table.
Having come back the boys simply took off their clothes and went on with their games totally naked. "Our children start wearing clothes when they are five." their mother explained.
I wish I had been that kind of calm and non-rushing mother. I was not. I remember having been impatient and I certainly have rushed my children - and myself. I still keep on doing that. However, when children were small I tried to apologise in the evenings for all the obvious mistakes I had done during the day. Once having done that my daughter said: "Well, it´s all right. Anyway, it´s better to have a yelling mother than no mother at all." - All is relative and some things have a lasting effect.
Later in the evening the battery of my mobile phone went flat just when I was talking with my friends in Hungary. I had to wait for it to operate again. When a book catches your eye, you need to take it. Meanings of Life (ISBN: 0-89862-531-9) was sending special messages from the bookself. This is what I found in it:
"People believe that happiness depends on their immediate circumstances, and they often believe that changing the circumstances - as by getting out of an unhappy marriage - will bring about a major change in their level of happiness. But these beliefs appear to be wrong, or at least greatly exaggerated. Happiness remains fairly constant over the long run."
The author of Meanings of Life is Roy F. Baumeister. He cites research. A two-sentence summary of the adaption-level theory of happiness states that good and bad events have only a temporary effect on subjective feelings, which soon return to the baseline and people have different baselines. After any event, good or bad, happy people go back to being happy, while unhappy people go back to being unhappy.
Sometimes I feel worried about feeling worried. Once we were talking about things like that with teacher students. I said that to my mind the basic idea of the Christian religion is to liberate human beings from all worries and feeling worried is perhaps the biggest of all sins. "All sins are of the same size." somebody said. "One sin is not bigger or smaller than any other."
Well, we have t-shirts and blue jeans of various sizes, but would God really use scales and measures to determine the value of our shortcomings? Even that remains untold to us. You have to decide that yourself.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Two Types of Language
The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions.
Last week I was talking to an audience about the requirements our present working life sets us. Principally I was saying that intelligence and creativity belong to the basic concepts we need to know and be aware of. This is how questions came to my mind. I wanted to know what happened in the field of questions in the very begining. So I took the Bible and found out.
It is easy for you to check in the Bible that the act of creation does not include any questions, just simple statements. God was as if he were talking to himself. He said this, and he said that, and what he said was exactly what he wanted to exist. I mean that his words did not refer to anything. They were that something.
I find this a bit difficult to explain, because as human beings we always need to refer to something when we express our thoughts. We need to know what kind of social agreements we have on the meanings of all words.
Our words refer to something, but think of God´s words. I have to take an example: if God said a ´dog´ a dog started to exist, to wag the tail, to bark and sniffle; if he said a ´swallow´, a swallow came into existence and started to fly around to catch flies. This also shows how important it was for him to think first and to talk just after that. What would a swallow be, if there were no flies to catch, for instance? There was no room for slipshod words and utterances. What would happen, if he said ´hmmmhhmm´ or ´oh-ohhoh´? He had to be careful, make exact plans, and work systematically. No wonder he felt tired on the seventh day.
It is obvious that God wanted an easier version of life for us than for himself. He knew that he had not given us that much concentration power and systematic thinking abilities. Or maybe he did not trust us much enough from the very beginning. Just think what would happen, if all our words really started to live and go around! All the ´hmmhhmms´ and ´oh-hhohs´. The mistrust becomes understandable, when we remember that God´s idea was that human beings would fill the earth.
It must have been due to that type of risks that human language was created separately. God just told the first human being to name all cattle, the fowl of the air, and every beast in the field and those names are just labels, not the very thing they refer to.
So far we know that in the beginning God did not ask anything. He just ´said´ and ´called´. Later on, when everything was ready and finished he was quietly walking in the garden, obviously enjoying all he had achieved. And there, in the cool of the day, we can hear God utter his first question.
We all know that any process of creation is contradictory. Creativitity helps us to control uncertainty, but simultaneously it generates new elements of uncertainty. It consumes energy and simultaneously it renews our energy resources. It causes feelings of joy and enjoyment, but it also makes us feel depressed and desperate.
It is totally possible that in God´s big project of creation there was no room, nor need or desire to ask anything. But now that everything was finished, the situation had changed. God perhaps looked around. He more or less returned to his normal life and asked his first question: "Where are you Adam?" (= exact translation of the 1992 Finnish version of Bible) "Where art thou?" (King James Version of the English Bible).
As to our present day, when calling anybody, the first question we ask is the very same God´s question: "Where are you?" It is often followed by another question "What are you doing?" as we need to make sure that the other person is able to concentrate on what we are going to tell them and they may be in a meeting or queuing in a supermarket or sunbathing somewhere in the tropic.
It is worth noticing that God did not ask the first human beings What are you doing? He knew that they had not yet any mobile phones. Neither did he want to pretend any more ignorance. He had to admit that he is almighty and he knew that the human beings were hiding and why they were doing so.
In fact, it is totally possible that even God´s Where are you? question was just to show people - and maybe to God himself too - that, if necessay, he was able to ask questions as well. He was not limited to just saying something, calling things into existence and blessing the things he had created.
Mobile phones have made the question Where are you? a normal, reasonable question in our every-day human level communication. Before mobile phones asking Where are you? was more or less limited to playing hide-and-seek with small children. Maybe they amused themselves by playing hide-and-seek in the Garden of Eden before anything bad had happened?
Although those two questions Where are you? and What are you doing? are important questions I was not paid for talking about them to my audience. They are not the basic questions our present working life asks us and wants to hear answers for. What our working life asks all of us is the simple question Who are you?
God never asked the first human beings Who are you? because he knew it better than they would ever be able to know themselves. Our working life asks us Who are you? because it knows that your answer to that simple question determines your answer to the question What are you able to do? as well. If you say ´I am...´ you also reveal ´I can...´and ´I am able to...´and that is what working life is interested in.
It is now Easter time, full moon and everything. Perhaps you remember what happened in Jerusalem more or less two thousand years ago?
God´s son, who spoke the same human type of language we all do, was talking with his friends about the Who are you? topics. He said "and thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. " (Matthew, 16:18)
We know that ´Peter´has contradictory reference in the same way creativity does. It refers to both solid rock and to a fallible and vulnerable human being.
Can you perhaps find some human efforts in life that would not be affected by this double reference?
Don´t you feel somehow unburdened?
Last week I was talking to an audience about the requirements our present working life sets us. Principally I was saying that intelligence and creativity belong to the basic concepts we need to know and be aware of. This is how questions came to my mind. I wanted to know what happened in the field of questions in the very begining. So I took the Bible and found out.
It is easy for you to check in the Bible that the act of creation does not include any questions, just simple statements. God was as if he were talking to himself. He said this, and he said that, and what he said was exactly what he wanted to exist. I mean that his words did not refer to anything. They were that something.
I find this a bit difficult to explain, because as human beings we always need to refer to something when we express our thoughts. We need to know what kind of social agreements we have on the meanings of all words.
Our words refer to something, but think of God´s words. I have to take an example: if God said a ´dog´ a dog started to exist, to wag the tail, to bark and sniffle; if he said a ´swallow´, a swallow came into existence and started to fly around to catch flies. This also shows how important it was for him to think first and to talk just after that. What would a swallow be, if there were no flies to catch, for instance? There was no room for slipshod words and utterances. What would happen, if he said ´hmmmhhmm´ or ´oh-ohhoh´? He had to be careful, make exact plans, and work systematically. No wonder he felt tired on the seventh day.
It is obvious that God wanted an easier version of life for us than for himself. He knew that he had not given us that much concentration power and systematic thinking abilities. Or maybe he did not trust us much enough from the very beginning. Just think what would happen, if all our words really started to live and go around! All the ´hmmhhmms´ and ´oh-hhohs´. The mistrust becomes understandable, when we remember that God´s idea was that human beings would fill the earth.
It must have been due to that type of risks that human language was created separately. God just told the first human being to name all cattle, the fowl of the air, and every beast in the field and those names are just labels, not the very thing they refer to.
So far we know that in the beginning God did not ask anything. He just ´said´ and ´called´. Later on, when everything was ready and finished he was quietly walking in the garden, obviously enjoying all he had achieved. And there, in the cool of the day, we can hear God utter his first question.
We all know that any process of creation is contradictory. Creativitity helps us to control uncertainty, but simultaneously it generates new elements of uncertainty. It consumes energy and simultaneously it renews our energy resources. It causes feelings of joy and enjoyment, but it also makes us feel depressed and desperate.
It is totally possible that in God´s big project of creation there was no room, nor need or desire to ask anything. But now that everything was finished, the situation had changed. God perhaps looked around. He more or less returned to his normal life and asked his first question: "Where are you Adam?" (= exact translation of the 1992 Finnish version of Bible) "Where art thou?" (King James Version of the English Bible).
As to our present day, when calling anybody, the first question we ask is the very same God´s question: "Where are you?" It is often followed by another question "What are you doing?" as we need to make sure that the other person is able to concentrate on what we are going to tell them and they may be in a meeting or queuing in a supermarket or sunbathing somewhere in the tropic.
It is worth noticing that God did not ask the first human beings What are you doing? He knew that they had not yet any mobile phones. Neither did he want to pretend any more ignorance. He had to admit that he is almighty and he knew that the human beings were hiding and why they were doing so.
In fact, it is totally possible that even God´s Where are you? question was just to show people - and maybe to God himself too - that, if necessay, he was able to ask questions as well. He was not limited to just saying something, calling things into existence and blessing the things he had created.
Mobile phones have made the question Where are you? a normal, reasonable question in our every-day human level communication. Before mobile phones asking Where are you? was more or less limited to playing hide-and-seek with small children. Maybe they amused themselves by playing hide-and-seek in the Garden of Eden before anything bad had happened?
Although those two questions Where are you? and What are you doing? are important questions I was not paid for talking about them to my audience. They are not the basic questions our present working life asks us and wants to hear answers for. What our working life asks all of us is the simple question Who are you?
God never asked the first human beings Who are you? because he knew it better than they would ever be able to know themselves. Our working life asks us Who are you? because it knows that your answer to that simple question determines your answer to the question What are you able to do? as well. If you say ´I am...´ you also reveal ´I can...´and ´I am able to...´and that is what working life is interested in.
It is now Easter time, full moon and everything. Perhaps you remember what happened in Jerusalem more or less two thousand years ago?
God´s son, who spoke the same human type of language we all do, was talking with his friends about the Who are you? topics. He said "and thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. " (Matthew, 16:18)
We know that ´Peter´has contradictory reference in the same way creativity does. It refers to both solid rock and to a fallible and vulnerable human being.
Can you perhaps find some human efforts in life that would not be affected by this double reference?
Don´t you feel somehow unburdened?
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Any Space between the Words?
Have you ever thought of the spaces between words? I do not mean the millimeters between written words, but the spaces between the words you say.
If you say something that you know by heart and have repeated several times, those spaces become very difficult to detect. Practically they disappear.
But when you want to construct new ideas, you probably have to scan for words to get your ideas expressed. You need to consciously think what you want to say and compare that to the expressions available in your mind. It may take time and effort to chain the meanings to satisfactorily describe what you want to express.
I have been reading a book about Russian culture lately (Opas venäläisyyteen ISBN:9-789511-209249). The book consists of articles dealing with what is considered to be typical and authentic in the Russian culture.
Spaces between words and concepts came to my mind when I read that by the turn of the 20th century there were two million industrial workers in Russia, but those two million people did not exist in the prevailing social class system of the country. Industrial workers were not included into the four estates.
Anyhow there were two million individual people living the normal life of the industrial workers of that time. I know that their exclusion from the four estates did not apply only to Russia. It is just that I came to think about it when reading that particular book.
The other day the news told that our Finnish employment authorities have trained special officials to guide and help people with high academic education to get satisfactorily established into the present working life system. These people work at the universities or in the public sector. Their income is based on scholarships and short-term project financing which makes their working life status precarious - especially if you want to lead normal life having a family and corresponding economic responsiobilities.
This becomes a matter of spaces between concepts, because those people have no steady jobs with enough security to allow them to apply for credit cards, for example. Neither are they considered to have enough risk to be regarded as self-employed people in the business sector. Not being the former nor the latter, their status is comparable to that of the industrial workers in the late 19th century.
We can think that the main objective of any organization is to produce new knowledge in its field of activity. It does not matter whether you work in the industry or in the public sector, all the time you must think how to make your organisation function better and better. If your company produces tyres like Nokian Tyres, you need to make sure that you are steadily and constantly producing new knowledge in the field of tyres. If you aren´t, your organisation will die.
Public organisations may function a bit more slowly than the market driven business, but the basic rules are the same. Think of hospitals, for instance. Medical expertise combined with engineering expertise has resulted in new knowledge. As patients and their families we seldom think that it is new knowledge. We just see that things in hospitals function better and more quickly.
New knowledge is based on experience. Somebody has said that the walls and files have experiences, but they are unable to share them with anybody. It is our human ability to share and compare experiences that makes us creators of knowledge. Machines do not make new knowledge, neither do rooms nor reports. Human beings do - provided they are able and willing to do so.
If we share experiences with people having similar kind of experiences it becomes difficult to see anything new. There are not enough spaces between the words and concepts. There is not enough hesitation and uncertainty. To be creative we need to face enough diversity and insecurity, but how much is enough? Everybody knows that too much insecurity and uncertainty destroys all creative efforts.
It would be very interesting to see what our world will be like in hundred years´ time. People in the history have been unable to see decisive emerging trends in and besides their normal life. The same applies to us.
Maybe it is just because the present is so tightly squeezed between the past and the future and there is so little space around the words and concepts.
If you say something that you know by heart and have repeated several times, those spaces become very difficult to detect. Practically they disappear.
But when you want to construct new ideas, you probably have to scan for words to get your ideas expressed. You need to consciously think what you want to say and compare that to the expressions available in your mind. It may take time and effort to chain the meanings to satisfactorily describe what you want to express.
I have been reading a book about Russian culture lately (Opas venäläisyyteen ISBN:9-789511-209249). The book consists of articles dealing with what is considered to be typical and authentic in the Russian culture.
Spaces between words and concepts came to my mind when I read that by the turn of the 20th century there were two million industrial workers in Russia, but those two million people did not exist in the prevailing social class system of the country. Industrial workers were not included into the four estates.
Anyhow there were two million individual people living the normal life of the industrial workers of that time. I know that their exclusion from the four estates did not apply only to Russia. It is just that I came to think about it when reading that particular book.
The other day the news told that our Finnish employment authorities have trained special officials to guide and help people with high academic education to get satisfactorily established into the present working life system. These people work at the universities or in the public sector. Their income is based on scholarships and short-term project financing which makes their working life status precarious - especially if you want to lead normal life having a family and corresponding economic responsiobilities.
This becomes a matter of spaces between concepts, because those people have no steady jobs with enough security to allow them to apply for credit cards, for example. Neither are they considered to have enough risk to be regarded as self-employed people in the business sector. Not being the former nor the latter, their status is comparable to that of the industrial workers in the late 19th century.
We can think that the main objective of any organization is to produce new knowledge in its field of activity. It does not matter whether you work in the industry or in the public sector, all the time you must think how to make your organisation function better and better. If your company produces tyres like Nokian Tyres, you need to make sure that you are steadily and constantly producing new knowledge in the field of tyres. If you aren´t, your organisation will die.
Public organisations may function a bit more slowly than the market driven business, but the basic rules are the same. Think of hospitals, for instance. Medical expertise combined with engineering expertise has resulted in new knowledge. As patients and their families we seldom think that it is new knowledge. We just see that things in hospitals function better and more quickly.
New knowledge is based on experience. Somebody has said that the walls and files have experiences, but they are unable to share them with anybody. It is our human ability to share and compare experiences that makes us creators of knowledge. Machines do not make new knowledge, neither do rooms nor reports. Human beings do - provided they are able and willing to do so.
If we share experiences with people having similar kind of experiences it becomes difficult to see anything new. There are not enough spaces between the words and concepts. There is not enough hesitation and uncertainty. To be creative we need to face enough diversity and insecurity, but how much is enough? Everybody knows that too much insecurity and uncertainty destroys all creative efforts.
It would be very interesting to see what our world will be like in hundred years´ time. People in the history have been unable to see decisive emerging trends in and besides their normal life. The same applies to us.
Maybe it is just because the present is so tightly squeezed between the past and the future and there is so little space around the words and concepts.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Is Botswana on Your Map?
As human beings we are constructors of realities. Last weekend I got caught in what Alexander McCall Smith keeps on constructing in Botswana. Before having read any of his books I had no idea about a country called Botswana nor about the life people lead there. They did not exist on my personal map of the world.
Medieval maps described unknown regions covering them with pictures of monsters, dragons and strange-looking wildlife, sometimes with the text "Hic sunt leones."
In fact those markings indicated that even those regions had a meaning. They somehow existed in people´s minds. But there are things in the world that do not exist even that much, matters that have no reference to. Atoms and radio waves could serve as examples of them.
A couple of years ago a pre-planned, but hasty visit to a bookshop in Edinburgh became my memorable entrance to life in Botswana. Since then I have learned to know Mma Ramotswe, Mma Makutsi as well as Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and other people in The No. 1 Ladies´Detective Agency.
Had there not been a particular shelf dedicated to Scottish authors alone, I might never have had the possibility to spend my time In the Company of Cheerful Ladies or The Kalahari Typing School for Men.
Last weekend I got again stuck in Botswana, more closely in Caborone, Zebra Drive.
I do not stop admiring Alexander McCall Smith as an author. While reading my first Mma Ramotswe book I had to turn back to the front cover to check the name of the author. Really, the author is a man. In spite of that he describes women´s life leaving no room for leones nor pictures of dragons and monsters.
In an interview in Helsinki Mr McCall Smith was asked what makes this possible. "I just try to listen to women." He also told us that it is not easy. When women notice that they are listened to, they change the topic.
Is there anything to be learned from this? A simple answer: listening is a valuable skill. A not-so-simple answer: describing your own reality is involuntary, something that you do without paying attention to it. If focusing on the "correct" way to describe something, you loose the point, you make choices, in other words you start telling stories. Stories are always told to somebody, for some specific reason. They are stories, not descriptions of the so-called normal life. They take a moral standpoint. They present a challenge to be negotiated about. Stories bring in politics.
McCall Smith having entered as a listener in women´s discussions and chats, automatically changes the situation. What women talk about becomes something they purposefully let him hear or listen to. If that results in receiving and registering information of their normal life is for McCall Smith to decide. Obviously he is not content with what is offered, but reaches to the regions marked with pictures of dragons and "Hic sunt leones."
Another admirable feature in The No 1 Ladies´Detective Agency is the fact that you can pick up any of the eight books to be immediately in "medias res". Picking up the next book you meet the same people, you hear their life stories again, and anyhow the author avoids repetition.
It is evident that he is good at telling people´s life stories in the way we normally tell them. In the course of the life we offer each other situationally specific, lightly different versions of who we are and who we would like to be. Getting stuck with one version only would mean swimming against the currents of life and falsifying reality. In The No 1 Ladies´ Detective Agency it would mean the end of the story. Who would want that?
Have you ever thought about building a learning organization? No matter if it is a family or a business enterprise, you need the skill to make people adopt certain goal-oriented attitudes and behaviour. You may define the goals and the means to reach them, but anyhow people won´t do exactly what you want them to do. We are no copying machines. We want to make our personal versions of the goals as well as of the means and methods of making them become true. The personal and the collective needs to be fitted together. Unless the balance between them is found neither the collective goals nor the individual versions of them will be reached.
So far there are eight books describing The No 1 Ladies´Detective Agency. Each of them is different and all of them fulfill the same purpose. If you want to find out what that purpose is, you could read, for instance The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (ISBN:978-0-349-11773-7).
Botswana and Finland are far from each other. Anyhow, there are evident similarities between these two countries. One of them is described like this:
"Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. "That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else."
Spring is coming. It is now five p.m. and almost full daylight. The period of short days is getting over. All who can will travel to Lapland to ski. People are starting to plan their summer, how to get back to the normal state of Finnish life, in the country, by the lakes, away from towns. Before that most traditionally built ladies start thinking of their diet, but similar to Mma Ramotswe very few take strict, concrete measures to limit their life. There is always a Mma Potokwani among one´s friend whose fruit cakes are irresistible...
Medieval maps described unknown regions covering them with pictures of monsters, dragons and strange-looking wildlife, sometimes with the text "Hic sunt leones."
In fact those markings indicated that even those regions had a meaning. They somehow existed in people´s minds. But there are things in the world that do not exist even that much, matters that have no reference to. Atoms and radio waves could serve as examples of them.
A couple of years ago a pre-planned, but hasty visit to a bookshop in Edinburgh became my memorable entrance to life in Botswana. Since then I have learned to know Mma Ramotswe, Mma Makutsi as well as Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and other people in The No. 1 Ladies´Detective Agency.
Had there not been a particular shelf dedicated to Scottish authors alone, I might never have had the possibility to spend my time In the Company of Cheerful Ladies or The Kalahari Typing School for Men.
Last weekend I got again stuck in Botswana, more closely in Caborone, Zebra Drive.
I do not stop admiring Alexander McCall Smith as an author. While reading my first Mma Ramotswe book I had to turn back to the front cover to check the name of the author. Really, the author is a man. In spite of that he describes women´s life leaving no room for leones nor pictures of dragons and monsters.
In an interview in Helsinki Mr McCall Smith was asked what makes this possible. "I just try to listen to women." He also told us that it is not easy. When women notice that they are listened to, they change the topic.
Is there anything to be learned from this? A simple answer: listening is a valuable skill. A not-so-simple answer: describing your own reality is involuntary, something that you do without paying attention to it. If focusing on the "correct" way to describe something, you loose the point, you make choices, in other words you start telling stories. Stories are always told to somebody, for some specific reason. They are stories, not descriptions of the so-called normal life. They take a moral standpoint. They present a challenge to be negotiated about. Stories bring in politics.
McCall Smith having entered as a listener in women´s discussions and chats, automatically changes the situation. What women talk about becomes something they purposefully let him hear or listen to. If that results in receiving and registering information of their normal life is for McCall Smith to decide. Obviously he is not content with what is offered, but reaches to the regions marked with pictures of dragons and "Hic sunt leones."
Another admirable feature in The No 1 Ladies´Detective Agency is the fact that you can pick up any of the eight books to be immediately in "medias res". Picking up the next book you meet the same people, you hear their life stories again, and anyhow the author avoids repetition.
It is evident that he is good at telling people´s life stories in the way we normally tell them. In the course of the life we offer each other situationally specific, lightly different versions of who we are and who we would like to be. Getting stuck with one version only would mean swimming against the currents of life and falsifying reality. In The No 1 Ladies´ Detective Agency it would mean the end of the story. Who would want that?
Have you ever thought about building a learning organization? No matter if it is a family or a business enterprise, you need the skill to make people adopt certain goal-oriented attitudes and behaviour. You may define the goals and the means to reach them, but anyhow people won´t do exactly what you want them to do. We are no copying machines. We want to make our personal versions of the goals as well as of the means and methods of making them become true. The personal and the collective needs to be fitted together. Unless the balance between them is found neither the collective goals nor the individual versions of them will be reached.
So far there are eight books describing The No 1 Ladies´Detective Agency. Each of them is different and all of them fulfill the same purpose. If you want to find out what that purpose is, you could read, for instance The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (ISBN:978-0-349-11773-7).
Botswana and Finland are far from each other. Anyhow, there are evident similarities between these two countries. One of them is described like this:
"Our stomachs live in towns," said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. "That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else."
Spring is coming. It is now five p.m. and almost full daylight. The period of short days is getting over. All who can will travel to Lapland to ski. People are starting to plan their summer, how to get back to the normal state of Finnish life, in the country, by the lakes, away from towns. Before that most traditionally built ladies start thinking of their diet, but similar to Mma Ramotswe very few take strict, concrete measures to limit their life. There is always a Mma Potokwani among one´s friend whose fruit cakes are irresistible...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
