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.