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?