Normal_Life_in_Finland

Respetamos la Normalidad

2008-12-23T10:28:00.000-08:00

"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.

A Two-second Life-organizer

2008-11-06T07:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Constructing Memories and Prizing Books

2008-10-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

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!

Life Doesn´t Stop

2008-10-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

"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...

Mortality and Procreation

2008-09-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

"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.

Existing or Strangely Inexisting?

2008-08-31T13:01:00.000-07:00

"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.

Bits and Qubits

2008-08-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

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?

Surprises with Consequences

2008-08-07T06:22:00.000-07:00

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?

Sunshine and Stomach Ulcers

2008-07-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

"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.

Janus-faced Imaginations

2008-07-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

"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.

Where does God´s Home End?

2008-06-26T13:19:00.000-07:00

"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.

Human Mind and Sumerian Gods

2008-05-02T12:16:00.000-07:00

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?

The Weight of Your Brain?

2008-04-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

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 Last Finn Eats Fish and Tomatoes

2008-04-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

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...

Your Personal Level of Happiness?

2008-04-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

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.

Two Types of Language

2008-03-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

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?

Any Space between the Words?

2008-03-09T04:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Is Botswana on Your Map?

2008-02-24T01:43:00.000-08:00

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...

Strange Occupants in your Body

2008-02-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

Have you found any means to get rid of the rubbish that gradually gets accumulated into your joints, muscles and obviously also inside the bones?

I do not mean the mental waste, but the concrete physical waste that stops the muscles from getting their fair share oxygen and nutritions and makes you feel both stiff and stupid. My life - and the life of the people close around me - has been blessed with information of how to start getting rid of the slag that has been accumulating inside you. It is just the start, but without it you´ll be quite helpless and unable to improve the situation. This is due to the fact that as human beings we excel in learning.

Our capacity to learn is enormous, in fact unfathomable. We learn quickly. Our learning is random. The results are permanent.

When you get properly scared and startled, your body will remember it as long as it is alive. Maybe, even after that, but I still lack personal evidence of it.

There are also times and occasions in life when you get hurtlingly and painly disappointed. Your mind starts working to get over it. In the course of the time the mind will get busied and filled up with something else. The trouble fades more or less away. But your body does not put aside anything that has happened to it. It will always remember what the original event felt like.

Traumas accumulate in the body and because we cannot forget, we have to learn to live with the original reactions. This is how an occasional state of alarm becomes the normal state of the body. In a while you have no idea of anything better. You go on, not having any reference point indicating that the situation should somehow be changed - until you have no more energy to continue, until your body and mind start rebelling.

We are not only excellent learners. We are also able to make use of what other people have learned. I find it to be the most important and admirable feature of human life.

Have you ever paid attention to your dreams? I am a matter-of-fact person, not keen on any horoscopes, bio-rhythms or dream interpretation. However, there are times when some dreams are so obvious that you find them having a special message.

Last night I saw tens of thousands of ugly, strange people occupying my country. They were of all ages and there were masses of them. They just marched in and we - I do not know who the ´we´exactly were - were given an alarm of possible increase of robbery and trouble. We got out, and some of the occupants had tied their dogs at the gate. We had to negotiate and get them out somehow.

Having woken up I had to go and drink three glasses of water. As I had gone to a special treatment in the morning, obviously - and hopefully - all the accumulated waste products were on the move to get out of my body. Apparently it was a big enough of an event to be shown as a film on the screen of my mind. - Where I went to and whose learning and expertise did I make use of is to be seen here.

It is quite interesting to get acquainted with the pre-traumas version of one´s body. It feels strange. I mentioned this to my daughter. "Just install all your stiffness and despair where they used to be, and you will feel normal again." she said.

That is alternative one. I got another recommendation as well: "Have you ever thought of going to a spa, taking a mud bath and pressure showers?"

Me, just lazying around in a spa?

The Most Important Learning

2008-01-20T14:40:00.000-08:00

There is a study indicating that people in French bistros touch each other 110 times per hour. In English pubs they touch one another an average of three times an hour. Finnish pubs have not been studied.

If you asked me, what I have done lately, I would answer ´Nothing special.´ With no further questions we would pass over to other, probably more interesting topics - the lack of snow and plans for the summer. Sometimes what we name ´Nothing special´ hides something that would be worth paying attention to. Words are used as camouflage. The most important messages are the hidden messages.

´Nothing special´indicates mental laziness. It is an effort to shift the communicative responsibility onto the other person´s shoulders: "You talk. Me listen."

Many of us feel comfortable only when there is somebody else to tell us what to decide, what to do, what to pay attention to. In other words we would prefer having a mother or a wife to organize and control our life. There are men who have a wife whose main function is to control their drinking.

I´m not that much different. I would like to have a wife as well. However, I do not have any, and my mother has always been very reluctant to lead my life. This means that I am compelled to personally activate myself and shift gears to become socially active.

In Finland we are not supposed to talk too much. Nor are we supposed to emphasize our personal comings and goings. That makes it easy to evade building really meaningful social contacts. We appreciate quiet and withdrawing people. We automatically connect those characteristics with intelligence and trustworthiness. You never know what talkative people might end up to. If you are really enthusiastic about something, you had better pretend that you aren´t - that much.

Human beings and dogs are alike. Both are snifflers. No matter who we meet and in what kind of circumstances, we sniffle each other to be able to decide what to do next. Every group of people sends particular messages that you need to recognise if you want to become an accepted member. All cultures have their physical signs to show expertise, professionalism, friendship etc. These rules can be broken, of course, but breaking them makes it more difficult to find shared goals and objectives. A couple of Italians in a Finnish supermarket are easy to detect. Normally behaving Finns in a French bistro must look either stupid or hostile.

Anyway, being a talented sniffler, you never take ´Nothing special´ as a definite answer. Mine wasn´t that either. Really - it wasn´t any nothing-special-week.

On Saturday I went to Helsinki to a business seminar to learn how to build a learning organization "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole (reality) together." (Senge, The Fifth Discipline)

My long-term dream is to build a truly learning organization and I highly appreciate my team memebers who I share this goal with. It is exciting and intriguing to follow this process, to experience what empowerment means in practice.

Straightaway on Sunday we decided to have a nice and quiet strategy meeting with some people at Pajutila. Having arrived there, it was easy to see that the meeting would be nice, but not quiet. The place was absolutely crowded with people because of the 50 per cent sale that had just started. Two enjoyable events for the same day! We just postponed the meeting for later in the evening.

However, those events did not make the past week memorable. There will be other seminars and other opportunities to go to sales. Things and events that can be repeated do not necessarily require any special attention. That is why they tend to just flow away and be replaced by other things and events. Best we remember events that will never occur again and people we won´t be able to meet some other time as well.

My aunt was at the terminal care centre Pirkanmaan hoitokoti close to my house. I went to see her several times a day, which proved that we do not have time, we make it.

As time producing beings we constantly choose what we have time for and what we do with it - as long as there is still some time left in our personal allottment. Hers was getting scanty. Last night there was no more left.

What did I learn during that week?

In our life there are two kinds of people - those we can meet again and those we can´t.

If you have friends whom you meet once every five or ten years, you had better count how many times there are still left - and behave accordingly.

When sniffling around you meet people that might be interesting to learn to know better, do not hesitate to tell them that. Invite them to a French bistro or to an English pub. We have learned all our behaviour patterns in various cultural contexts. If your own culture does not teach you the value of touching, you need to learn from other cultures.

My most important learning during the past week was that when somebody´s allotted time is running out, being present, holding the hand, caressing the cheeks, rubbing the back is the only thing that you can do. And it is the only thing that has any real importance.

Northern Activities

2008-01-02T11:56:00.000-08:00

My father had excavators and bulldozers. Their engines were so big that they had to be started by means of a special inbuilt starting engine.

The engine proper may be big and efficient, but without a well-functioning starting engine it is worthless.

Christmastime made me remember my father´s excavators and bulldozers for several reasons. In the beginning of the holiday season I thought that my own engines have just run out of fuel. Having no energy for anything you just want to sleep and sleep and sleep. They say that the special charm of sleeping lies in the fact that in sleep we need not use any energy for controlling our thoughts. Sleeping means saving fuel.

Later I was a bit afraid thinking that maybe it is not just a starting engine problem. The main engine might be kaput. Need more fuel to be able to check the situation.

When are we free? I heard a programme on the radio about free time and free time activities. The general complaint was that free time has become something we feel obliged to fill in with activities in the same way the working time is filled with various tasks and duties. The difference between free time and working time is that the working life activities are more or less given to us. We know what we are supposed to do, but free time is something you need to organize yourself. You make the choices. In other words, you are free, but you need to use your energy to control your thoughts and activities. Instead of generating energy, our programmable free time consumes it. In these circumstances the only possibility to be really free is to sleep.

We had a serious conversation with my daughter. The basic idea she wanted to express was that she never learned to "be by herself". She never saw me just "being by myself". All the time there´s some kind of goal oriented activity going on, probably something worth being included into the cv.

My daughter was right. For generations my family has been known as diligent hardworking people. My father´s family lived on a big lake. There was no road to their tiny farm. On the other side of the lake lived another big family. Their farm was equally small and had no road either.

The difference between the social status of those two families was, however, clear. In my father´s family all of the eight children had their own pair of shoes. On the other side of the lake the children had to share only one pair of shoes. They had less freedom than my father´s family, especially in winter. For instance they had to go out to the toilet taking turns, because walking bare foot on the snow is out of question - unless you are returning from the sauna bath. Additionally that was the time before climatic disturbances.

My mother´s family was no better. My grandfather owned barges and transported wood to St Petersburgh. It was still sailing time when the October revolution in 1917 started. My grandmother told us that someone had come to tell them that shooting was starting and they had better sail back to Finland.

Alongside wood my grandfather traded luxury goods from St Petersburgh. When you have a scalable profession, you need to pay attention to anything around you. You never know where and when business opportunities knock. You learn to be active at all times and in all relations - and that attitude is not only contagious but also hereditary.

Maybe you live in Finland and want to build a house or renovate it. You hire men to do that. It might be useful to know a couple of things first. One of them is that the men come in and they start planning the project with you. Instead of encouraging and complimenting you for all the decisions you have made so far, they will tell you why the project is extremely difficult, expensive and, in fact, absolutely impossible. Listening to them you feel how your own enthusiasm starts fading out. You feel desperate and ashamed and you want to apologise for ever having dreamt of any new or renovated house.

Just when your self-esteem has sunk to the bottom of the ocean, one of the workmen finds a possible solution for one of the problems, then there is another solution for another problem, then one more, until all of the terrible problems have been solved. Still feeling weak you return back to the surface understanding that it is exactly this particular group of heroes you need to hire if you ever want to live in your beautiful dream house - and you feel a special pride for having this opportunity to hire them.

Why am I telling this? The reason is simple and connected with the idea of life-long learning. No matter what you want to achieve in your life, you need the skill of making yourself a hero. If you do not know how to become and be a hero, just start registering how other people do it - and then copy what they do.

Another thing you need to know about hiring men for your building project in Finland is that one day nothing happens on the site. They do not come. Neither do they answer the phone. Then all of a sudden the work starts again without any explanations. You smell the old alcohol and feel relieved, because you hired heroes and you want to keep them. What you need to know is that heroes never get tired. They cannot take a normal holiday because of tiredness, but they can go for a drunken spree for a couple of weeks. Heroes have their faults, but they have no signs of weakness.

In the old days, long before the climatic changes, Finnish people more or less slept through the winter. The pace of life slowed down. Because of all online global contacts we cannot afford that any more. We just go on. This reminds me of our traditional all-the-year-round activities and of a true story that took place in Lapland.

Somebody coming from the south of Finland asked a Saame man in Lapland what activities these poor people have there, so isolated and so far up north. The man answered: "In summer we fish and make love. In winter we do not fish."

That is the normal life we would be leading here, if there were no railway and airplane timetables. In summer 1959 my father built the road to Utsjoki, the northernmost commune of Finland. The name of his bulldozer traxvator was Caterpillar 955. That is how and when the postal bus with its regular time table arrived in Utsjoki making use of diligent, hardworking people. Maybe it would, in the long run, be more valuable to turn back to the basics and not fish that much.

You might like to see what Utsjoki looks like - without any time tables.

Could Proust Change your Life?

2007-12-17T12:33:00.000-08:00

One of my Spanish friends had a dream. He wanted to become an architect. He had, however, left the university and made a career in journalism. As time passed he got fed up with his work. He wanted to have a better life. One day he just re-organized his life and left his family.

It is interesting to see that re-organizing one´s life generally means leaving the marriage. The reason may be so simple that for most people their marriage is the only piece of the puzzle that can be moved.

Moving to another place to live does not look like a solution. Finding new hobbies and interests requires too much effort. Changing the job looks too risky and even impossible if you are classified as an old person. The only thing you really can change is the marriage. Breaking the marriage is possible and additionally it is also an easy solution, provided you just walk out and leave your partner to clean up the physical and emotional mess.

You may say that I am exaggerating and totally wrong. Anyway, I could make a list of my friends that have done that kind of cleaning work after twenty-plus years of an ordinary marriage.

All right - my friend left. Some time had passed when we met again. I asked about his studies of architecture. He said that he had left them aside. I was astonished, because I knew how important that dream had been to him. He had been in the habit of sooner or later mentioning that had studied architecture. "Well, in the 1970´s my ideas were unique, fresh and brilliant, but it was then. Now the younger generation has grown up with those ideas. For them they have been their daily bread." He looked a bit sad, but also a bit relieved. He had got rid of a big dream.

What does it mean to become a mature adult person? Shrinking the dreams? Loosing curiosity? Becoming insomniac? Or the simple realisation that you really have shrunk your dreams and then forgotten them, you have lost curiosity towards most phenomena in life, and additionally you have become insomniac staying awake at night not even having anything special to worry about.

Sometime ago I bought a book called How Proust Can Change your Life (Finnish edition ISBN: 978-951-1-20708-5). Maybe I have mentioned that before. It does not matter, because it just proves that I should have added forgetfulness into the above list of the obvious signs of mature adulthood.

Now my so-far-complete definition of mature adulthood looks like this: Your dreams are shrunk, you feel no curiosity, you stay awake at nights, and you forget this and that.

One remedy to forgetfulness is to buy books and surround yourself with them. In a few weeks´ time library books have to be taken back, which means that your memory extends into geographically unmanageable dimensions.

If Proust can change your life, as Alain de Botton, the author of the book, promises, all my friends with run-away husbands have toiled in vain when emptying their houses and flats after the divorce. Reading Proust would have helped and kept the husband where he used to be.

How does Proust help us? He says that we never learn anything unless we face problems, unless we suffer, unless things go astray. Proust says that a man - a male person - coming home tired, falling asleep, waking up fresh and well-slept, will never pay attention to anything important. This makes him incapable of making any inventions. How could he invent anything, if he does not even know that he is sleeping?

According to Proust only pain and suffering make us think. Pain makes thinking imperative, because we need to fit ourselves into and among it. To fit in, we need to identify the origin and range of the pain. In a way your suffering is a map and you have to define the location of the red spot with the text ´You are here´.

Sometimes we think and have thoughts that are not pushed or pulled by suffering. According to Proust those thoughts have their origin in the pure and neutral desire for knowledge. That neutral desire - can desire ever be neutral? - makes it possible for us to coldly and calmly analyse what sleep is or why people forget things. But those thoughts have no value. Valuable thoughts have their origin in the tears on your pillow and in the insistent tinnitus that wakes you up at nights.

Proust says that there are two ways leading to wisdom and maturity. One is painless because you have teachers who help you to learn something. The other one is painful because you experience the thing yourself - whatever ´the thing´ might be. Proust prefers and appreciates the painful way and he is in earnest - the last fourteen years of his life he stayed in bed writing an over-long novel in the semidarkness because he did not have a proper reading lamp by his bed.

However, the keyword in the above is ´learning´. No change has ever become true before you have learned to do something in a different way. The basic and fundamental tragedy lies in the fact that we learn anything, not just the things we would like to learn. We learn to shrink our dreams. We learn to behave in the ways that have nothing to do with enthusiasm and curiosity. And maybe we even learn to stay awake at night. No matter what habits you have, you have learned them.

Christmas is approaching. Days will be getting longer little by little. In comparison with yesterday, today got shorter only in the morning. Here in the south of Finland the evening shortening has reached its maximum today.

We do not have any snow yet, which has had two practical consequences: I got the tulip bulbs planted. Samuli hit the wholes for them with a heavy iron rod and I dropped the pulps in. With the help of the same heavy iron rod he dug a grave big enough for Uffe.

Uffe is now at the gate watching the passers by. He looked very beautiful sitting there and really paying attention to all details. If he saw something worth closer examination he went to see it. However, he knew that going to the street was strictly forbidden. So, coming back he walked directly to the bathroom door and asked to get in. Being closed in the bathroom was his punishment. It was perfectly clear to him that wrongdoings need to be punished and after the punishment life will go on as it normally does.

Perhaps we need not give up all our desire for excitement and adventure. Maybe we could start exercising our dreaming muscles so that they would be stretched back to their original size again. Should we go too far, we know to which door to return for the punishment and - as far as I know - life has a strong tendency to fall back to the normal again.

By the way, when Proust could not sleep at night, he read train time tables. He imagined what was happening in various places the trains were passing by at a certain point of time - troubled mariages, political intrigues and agricultural hardship... What else?

Effective Love and Recycling

2007-12-09T06:17:00.000-08:00

Laughter cannot be recycled. If you tell the same joke twice, you have compelled your audience to use recycled laughter. They might try to hide their feelings, but their automatic reaction is embarassment.

Recycling jokes is questionable. Just remember how demanding it is to hear your husband - or any other member of your family - telling the same joke for the fiftieth time.

However, recycling may also indicate that you have some very special talent. Today´s paper tells about Harri Miettunen, Jean Sibelius and his music. Harri Miettunen plays tuba in the Tampere Filharmonic orchestra. If you have had anything at all to do with the brass instruments in the Tampere region, you know that Miettunen is a man of stories. The latest story is a story of him detecting majestic recycling.

Years ago when Miettunen was playing Finlandia, he was struck - or puzzled - by the perception that the music was, as if it were constructed around the same theme. Later on he realised that the same theme was repeated in Tapiola as well as in all symphonies by Jean Sibelius.

Every time when Sibelius has something important to tell us, he makes somehow use of four particular notes. He started his first symphony with them and with them he finished the seventh. No wonder he never wrote any more symphonies.

Sibelius being as important as he is to us Finns, there is a lot of research and writing around him and his music. What I find particularly interesting now is that Sibelius, having died fifty years ago, did not reveal his secret to any serious academic music researchers. Harri Miettunen is a tuba-player, in other words a blue-collar musician. Additionally he is known as a man with stories and practical jokes.

What do you think, did Sibelius do this on purpose? If so, why did he choose Harri Miettunen from the Tampere Filharmonic as his messenger. He could have chosen one of the serious academic researchers of his music anywhere around the world. While pondering that, it might be a good idea to open a bottle of Sibelius champagne.

When studying world literature at the university I became depressed. The reason was simple. The descriptions of the production of any author were summarized with he statement that, in fact, this or that individual book contained all that the particular author really had to say. Maybe, those poor authors with international fame and importance had written several books, and anyhow only one of them would have been enough to tell what they had to tell. So much work and so little wool!

Maybe those people should have chosen composing music instead of writing books. Anybody capable of reading and writing can say anything about your text, but the number of people capable of analysing your music is limited. You have better possibilities to hide your recycled ideas and be taken as a versatile genius - or a genius in recycling themes.

However, recycling your own ideas - which you anyway have somehow learned from others - is not bad if compared with copying other people´s ideas already published as texts. It is interesting to follow how important and influential people can become, just having copied something from one language to another. Here we could refer to the topic of my previous article (3.12.2007). We could start thinking, who have greater responsibility of informing the copy right holders of unauthorised copies - those who have done it or those who know it to have happened.

Now my choice of topics is leading towards a cul-de-sac. The only escape is to turn around.

Last week end we had snow and proper winter weather with some cold (-7 C). Now the snow has melt. It is warm and dark (+ 5 C). Days are getting shorter and shorter. Today we got the tulip bulbs planted. It certainly was the eleventh moment to plant some continuity among all randomness of the normal life.

I just started reading The Five Love Languages for Singles by Gary Chapman (ISBN: 1-881273-98-9). I have read his Five Love Languages which is dedicated to married couples. I know the basic message.

We all have our own special ways to interprete what love is, but if you want to show that you love someone, you need to know what he or she interpretes love to be .

You can test yoursel first: How do you know that someone loves you? Do you need to get presents to know that the other person loves you? Do you need to receive services and be taken care of? Do you need to be involved in discussions and reasoning? Do you want to have physical contact? Or is it important to you that the other person repeatedly says that he or she loves you?

I admire Gary Chapman´s practical reasoning. It is conscise and simple. You might think - knowingly or more or less unknowingly - that love is revealed by means of various services, making food, taking the rubbish out etc. The other person may just talk about love without doing any special services. Sooner or later you start feeling as if the other person did not really love you. He or she may really love you, but you are not able to understand his or her love language. It is nice to know that foreign languages are learned.

The same applies to yourself. If you think that real love is revealed by giving presents, the other person is just wasting time telling you again and again that he or she loves you. Just saying that he or she loves you does not prove anything to you. They are the presents that really show love to you. Recognizing your own love language can help you to understand what is going on in various relationships.

Five Love Languages makes a good and useful Christmas present. And because Chapman is good at recycling, you can find Five Love Languages for Children as well. The preface of Five Love Languages for Singles promises in a matter-of-fact way that "you will discover how to give and receive love effectively."

As we tend to load the Christmas time with so much expectancy of happiness and togetherness, it might be a good idea to get properly prepaired. It would be nice to avoid contradictions and disappointments and have the expecations fulfilled...

You will read one of those books very quickly, just in case.

Special Places in Hell

2007-12-03T03:46:00.000-08:00

My daughter is talking on the phone. I do not like overhearning anything, but now there is one sentence that sticks into my mind: "It is not easy to be a young woman."

Short, well-formed sentences stick.

Another short statement I have in my mind now is by Nicholas Nassim Taleb: "We are social animals; hell is other people."

Those two sentences combined should result in what Madeleine Albright has said: "There´s a special place in hell for women who don´t help each other."

Finnish teenage school children go to work to learn to know normal Finnish working life. For a couple of weeks time they look around in a workplace and do some petty tasks. Children, their parents and the school look together for companies and organizations to go to.

A couple of years ago there was a case in court in Helsinki. Schoolgirls that had been working in a fashion shop, had become victims of sexual harassment by their middle-aged-elderly employer.

If you know anything about sex, children and crimes you know at least three things: young girls do not want to be touched by old men - and for them ´old´ means two or three years older than they themselves; adult men insist that they are the girls who tempt and seduce them and so the poor old man becomes a victim of them; girls carry the consequences in their mind and in their body for all their life, unless they get appropriate help and therapy, which they may never get, because they feel guilty and hide what has happened. Parents may never know anything about the thing and if they know, they might not believe their own child. Some of the parents avoided this trap and the case got into court.

Why am I telling this to you? It is because of the third sentence that has stick to my mind, because of the words Madeleine Albright has said in Stockholm 24.8.2004: "There´s a special place in hell for women who don´t help each other."

That special fashion shop in the centre of Helsinki is by no means run by child labour. There is regular staff there. Adult women. Do you think it probable that people who have for years worked in the same place do not know what is taking place around them? Do you think they are blind? Do you think they do not understand what they see and hear?

My mind got mixed up and vomited when I read about what had taken place in that special fashion shop. Those adult ladies did not intervene in what was happening.

I have just found a book with the title Helvetissä on erityinen paikka naisille jotka eivät auta toisiaan, the exact Finnish translation of the Madeleine Albright sentence. The book has been written by Liza Marklund and Lotta Snickare (ISBN:951-1-20640-0) The original is in Swedish, Det finns en särskild plats i helvetet för kvinnor som inte hjälper varandra.

If you want to buy that book in Finnish, you had better hurry up. It was published in 2006 and it is already on sale. It means that in a while you won´t get it anywhere.

In Finnish we have a word surkuhupainen meaning that something is at the same time funny and sad, tragicomic. Some of the stories in the book sound like that.

Liza Marklund and Lotta Snickare use examples of our normal, everyday life to reveal how life is made difficult not only for young women, but for all women. This does not mean that men, or anybody else, would always do that on purpose. It just means that the existing social power structures make the unequality producing processes so automatic that it is difficult to detect them. We all are victims of those automatically functioning structures. It is not until we learn to see how things happen that we can change anything. We are lucky to have people like Marklund and Snickare, whose expertise we can make use of.

You´ll enjoy reading the text. But beware - your world will be changed! I do not mean any aggressive change. You´ll just learn new ways of seeing differently many tiny-looking everyday incidents of the normal life, at work and at home, and that will change your whole world. This kind of teeny-weeny learning can beat paths into new worlds.

If I were a novelist or a detective, I would try to find out, which were the reasons for the adults - women and possible men - to not inform anybody about their employer´s doings. Had they themselves gone through similar experiences? Was sex included in their job interview? Did they want life to pay the young girls measure for measure?

Maybe you know Paolo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What we need to learn from Freire is that those who have been oppressed and treated badly, do the same when they get enough power to do that. Those who have been beaten, beat others. Those who have been slaves, take slaves for themselves. Unfortunately there is still hereditary slavery in Africa to prove that, too.

Referring to Freire must not lead to the conclusion that we should be content with what we have. Changing circumstances is not easy, but it is not impossible either. To change anything, we need to understand first what power is and how it works. Marklund and Snickare´s book is an eye-opener. They are the tiny and teeny-weeny little things by means of which our world is constructed and kept functioning with. Change them and you will have changed a lot.

I hope the book will be translated into English as well! So far, www.amazon.com does not recognize the authors.

Let´s keep our eyes open - and dare see!

Tulips, Muslims and Christians

2007-11-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

As human beings we live in a constant state of expectancy. We expect something to happen. And if we do not expect anything to happen, we expect that the state of non-expectancy will just continue.

There are two special things all people living in Finland expect and look forward to just at present. We want to get snow. If you have not lived here from autumn until Christmas (cf. the text 12.10.2007) it might be difficult for you to imagine what it means that the days are short and dark. When we have snow, the days are just short. The darkness disappears and all your body and mind rejoice because of that.

During the short, dark days all kinds of gloomy and dark ideas just smuggle their way into your mind. And they do not just come and go. They stick. They are difficult to just hush away. We need to make conscious effort to light some lamps, candles and stars amidst the thoughts that travel through the mind and occupy it. To tell the truth, as a nation, we are now just pretending to be normal. If you do not like to deal with people who collectively pretend to be something they really are not, contact us another time, in spring. Come back at the end February, the beginning of March. The lamps, candles and stars will be seen in people´s eyes then. Come to ski on the lakes, through the snow-covered forests and fjells in the most beautiful sunshine you can ever find - especially in Lapland.

In addition to snow, we are now looking forward to Christmas time. Today I had to cancel some business appointments and had some extra time. We went with my mother to buy tulip bulbs. The ground is not yet frozen which means that it is still possible to plant them.

T.H. Elliot writes in the Waste Land that April is the cruellest month breeding out the dull roots of memory and desire. Had he lived in Finland, he would never have said that. April - to my mind - is the most inspiring and invigorating month, especially in Lapland where I grew up. Here in the south of Finland, the barren soil of the end of April and the beginning of May is spotted by colourful tulips and daffodils.

The oral traditions of the Prophet Muhammad state that in the afterlife people will do what they most enjoy doing on earth. As far as I know, we Christians believe that in the afterlife there is a special place reserved for everyone of us. There are also some duties and responsibilities attached to the place, and because of that we need to develop certain personality traits and skills during our lifetime. When we die, the learning process will continue in the eternity.

C.S. Lewis has said somewhere that from the point of view of the eighty or ninety years we live here on the earth, it does not matter that much, what characteristics we develop. But from the point of view of the eternity, it is decisive.

What Lewis says has made me think of all the consequences my own doings and activities may have, in what kind of building processes they probably take part in. I also think that Lewis has offered us a solid and fundamental argument for life-long learning. Additionally, his idea reveals what size millstones will be placed around the neck of the teachers who somehow kill the desire to learn in their pupils and students.

Anyway, according to Muslim thinking all flowers belong to heaven and the gardeners will surely go to paradise - to continue their work, they too!

For Christians the paradise was a shining city on a hill. The Muslims, coming from deserts, looked forward to an endless garden of delight, full of pavillions, fountains and flowers. The most precious of the flowers were the tulips. The Ottoman gardeners considered only the rose, the narcissus, the carnation and the hyacinth worthy to be planted alongside tulips.

Normally I buy one hundred tulip bulbs every autumn. Now I have just sixty of them plus two-and-a-half kilo of narcissi. Buying per kilo sounded a bit strange, but getting fifty percent reduction of the price makes the decision making process quick and smooth, no matter what you want to buy. The significant reduction also reveals that it is the eleventh moment to plant the bulbs. Not doing that quickly, would mean loosing the excitement of spring mornings when I get out to check how many bulbs really come out to greet the sun.

As to tulips, it is very interesting to think of various cultures and their knowledge creation processes. The tulips belong to the special expertise of the Dutch people since the 1550´s. I need not tell you that the tulips and narcissi I bought come from Holland. It is self-evident.

Mike Dash has written an excellent description of the cultural and economic history of the tulips, Tulipomania, The Story of the World´s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions it Aroused (ISBN: 0-575-40250-4). The story is worth knowing, especially if you are interested in the futures market, a form of speculation in which a dealer gambles on the future price of some commodity.

We are approaching Advent. I have arranged a special parking place for angels that are going around.

When writing these texts, or anything else, I need to stop every now and then to look for ideas and connections between them. Normally I look to the left. What I see there are some pictures of my son smiling happily on some mountains in France, Alexander McCall Smith equally happy-looking in the Academic Bookshop in Helsinki, plus two small coloured graphics I have bought in Slovenia.

If you always do, what you have always done, you will always get, what you have always gotten.
I need now new sources of ideas and encouragement. Small changes result in big consequences. Instead of looking for ideas on my left-hand side, I want to learn to look at the right. What I see then is this special parking place for angels - golden, shiny angel wings resting on a stick. It´s a pitty, my camera is travelling around the world. I have no control over its movements. If I ever get it back and under my own control, I´ll add here a picture of the angel wings so that you will be able to see the same I see now.

Scars, Wounds and Pain

2007-11-12T00:23:00.000-08:00

Maybe you have sometimes had the same feeling I´m having now: the doors behind are closed, the new ones in the front have not yet opened.

Feelings and experiences like that come and go. That´s what life has taught to us. That´s what we learn willingly or by force. Sometimes you wait with happy expectation the new doors to open. Sometimes you would not mind whether they open or not. The grey November with short days and bare trees does not shake or push you in any way towards a bright and inviting future. - Just read how Tobias describes our present mental-climatic conditions in his blog in Spanish.

I was in Bosnia last week. Their days get dark at about five in the afternoon, but their mornings open up in full daylight sometime between six and seven. It is a difference that makes a difference, as Gregory Bateson has said.

What was alike in Bosnia? People´s dreams - the ones they want to become true as well as the ones they have had to give up. Some buildings were in ruins, others had their skeleton left standing up, almost all were scarred, as if they had measels. If there were no traces of the war, they were brand-new or still under construction.

Shopwindows told their own stories about people´s shared dreams as well - elegant clothes, shoes, handbags, shiny jewelry, inviting furniture...

It is very limiting not to be able to communicate with people, especially when you now that every single place, object and incident has a story to tell. The overall coverage of stories has been underlined by Gregory Bateson:

"... the fact of thinking in terms of stories does not isolate human beings as something separate from the starfish and the sea anemones, the coconut palms and the primroses. Rather, if the world be connected, if I am at all fundamentally right in what I am saying, then thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds, whether ours or those of the redwood forests and sea anemones." (Mind and Nature, ISBN: 0-553-34575-3)

In Bosnia, when you do not know the language and when you have just a minimal knowledge of the history of the region, you miss a lot of the stories. Somehow you just see the text with punctuation marks, but you have to guess what has been actually written down. There are scars and echoes in the surroundings, but you have to create the content yourself. The cemeteries are visible, but the wounded people remain somewhere out of sight. All violence causes wounds, no matter how much effort we make to hide it.

I think we transform wounds into pain just to hide our wounds from others. Pain is personal. Wounds are social. When something hurts you really badly, the hurt and pain become so personal and so intime that you start thinking that your hurt and wounds rob you the right to be a full, respectable and respected member of the society.

In a way we tend to misinterpret the situation: instead of taking the right to scream out your pain, to make it public and shared, to point out the real source of the wrong, you keep quiet. Little by little your personal pain makes you hate the body that still carries the wound. The remedy you have is that the pain may become too intense and simply requires to be shared. In favourable circumstances this is the point when you can get rid of both the pain and the wound.

There is no way to organise human life without organising power relations between people, no matter whether it is a question about relations between individuals, groups of people or nations.
Normally we negotiate on how power is divided, how power relations in various situations should change. As a result of this normal negotiation-based approach to life we have well-functioning couples, families, organisations, nations, international relations. We may talk loud and shout, but in principle we still negotiate.

All violence is social. It is based on refusing to negotiate. Violence results in scarred buildings as well as wounded people hiding their wounds in their personal pain. We can just wonder what makes power so tasty and tempting that those who have it so easily and naturally take out their guns, fists and muscular force to beat their weaker ones.

One thing we should know is that when somebody has been beaten there is no need to beat him/her again. We need all our shared energy and talent to rebuild what has been destroyed. The doors to the past are closed. It is not the path that makes us walk. When doors to the future open, we beat the path. Spanish speaking people would say: Con pan y con vino, bien anda el camino. And you know the Spanish - all they do, is done with friends and relatives around. It means sharing.

It is interesting that in the Finnish language we do not have any equivalent for the English word ´share´. But it is equally interesting that we neither have any equivalent for the word ´looser´.

In the normal life in Finland we make mistakes, we have difficulties and hardship, and we fail. But that does not make us loosers. Mistakes and failures become true on the level of behaviour. Not on the level of our identity. We might have experienced terrible and disgusting things, but that does not make us anyhow second-rate people. That is why we in the Finnish language do not need the word ´looser´. On the identity level we remain intact. No matter what may have happened, we are valuable human beings.

Just got a fresh comment from Mostar. All this takes place on the street where the United World College is. Samuli does not know exactly what happened. Some people were killed, others wounded. We all should be in pain. See the video.

Stories and Russian roulette

2007-10-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

My mother had no possibility to get any academic education. "She is good enough for the plywood factory." her mother said to the teacher who came to tell her that the daughter should be sent to a secondary school. Instead of getting an academic education my mother became a specialised children´s nurse and a midwife. Today she is an enviable representative of the Finnish well-schooled generation who re-built this this country after the war and she can enjoy a proper retirement allowance.

There was a time in the late 1960´s going on through the 70´s that Finnish people still believed in Paradise. And it was not a matter of belief only. They had concrete evidence of its existence. In the autumn many members of their own family, their friends and neighbours left their houses still and empty and travelled away by bus and by train. Next summer they came back looking happy and driving their own new cars. My mother was a midwife in the south of Lapland, where this was very normal and little by little she had less and less work, because the majority of the babies of the municipality were now born in Sweden.

Mother wanted to learn to speak Swedish, just in case. She applied for a scholarship to take part in a course. In the application form she was asked about her previous knowledge of Swedish. She had never learned Swedish at school so I asked how she had defined her level of knowledge of it. "I wrote that I read, but I do not understand." she said. The same happens to me when I read Fooled by Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nocholas Taleb (ISBN: 978-0-141-03148-4). I do not understand the text, but I keep on reading.

Taleb´s text is worth reading just because it is highly enjoyable. It carries you forward to the next chapter, to the next page and then again to the next. I keep on reading as if I were addicted to it. Additionally Taleb describes a world I have very few ideas and no experience about, except that last summer I met Sergey from St Petersburg. It is nice to think that he is an actor in the trading world that Taleb describes like this:

"One of the attractive aspects of my profession as a quantitative option trader is that I have close to 95 % of my day free to think, read, research (or "reflect" in the gym, on ski slopes, or, more effectively, on a park bench). I also had the privilege of frequently "working" from my well-equipped attic."

I do not know if this is exactly true in Sergey´s case, but he looked relaxed and he was enthusiastic about his job. Because it was summer, we did not meet on a ski slope, but by a small lake in a water-skiing competition. I think there are enough matching facts here.

Taleb says that the human mind is not designed to understand how the world works. It is designed to get us out of trouble rapidly and have children - equally rapidly, I would like to add.

He also states that although life looks like a sequence of hesitation and bewilderment and feels like that, in the hindsight it is not. In retrospective everything looks as if we had always known what to do and how to choose. When looking back at our past, we see it well-planned and beautifully organised. There is no doubt nor vacilation, just straight lines and well motivated direct routes. Everything looks neatly ordered and reasonable. This phenomenon is called the ´hindsight bias´, the conviction that what has happened was bound to happen.

Because of the hindsight bias any catastrophy looks to us having been predictable before it actually happened. The Twin Towers collapse is one example of this phenomenon. Similarly, if something is regarded as an error in the present, it is as if the erroneus character of the matter had been recognizable in the past as well. Taleb says that it was not. Nobody could have told beforehand what would happen (to the Twin Towers). He also says that nobody will be able to say what the nect catastrophy is, but it having taken place, we will interprete some phenomena to be its traces. After we will have defined what these traces are, they become visible. Once visible, we will be unable to wipe them out.

Narrative approach to life and meaning making would say that we abhore chaos. Chaos is like a puzzle the pieces of which have been thrown into the air. There is no meaning in the separate pieces. However, life needs to make sense. A healthy human mind invents order and starts making sense, if there is none readily detectable in the experience. As this tendency is - and has been - common to all of us, we have developed sense-making systems, slots or plots in which the chaotic elements are fitted. In this process what was chaotic, becomes a well-organised story. Individual meaning-elements get trapped into stories and stories are the currency we exchange when we communicate with each other.

What does this have to do with normal life? To be an expert in any field means that you understand the stories and jokes related to it. A necessary prerequisite to understanding is that you have acquired enough personal knowledge to be able to evaluate what is normal and acceptable and what is not. If you are unable to distinguish the normal from the deviant, you do not know how you are supposed to react to a story and when you should laugh if someone is telling a joke.

When reading Taleb´s text I know that I am able to enjoy it as a form of literature, but I miss a lot of the knowledge and information he delivers. I do not know exactly when to laugh and how to feel. It is irritating. Sergey and his colleagues would gain much more from Fooled by Randomness, because they know what is normal in the trading and probability business and what is not.

Books contain universes. It is a privilege to be able to even try to visit them. One more thing I learned when reading Fooled by Randomness is that probability is a qualitative subject, not just a number game. 10 million dollars earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as the 10 milloin dollars earned through diligent and artful practice of dentistry. Sorry to say that I am not a dentist either. There seems to be just the Russian roulette left. - And maybe, it looks perfectly normal in the hindsight.

Belisa Crepusculario

2007-10-19T02:44:00.001-07:00

Belisa Crepusculario lived selling words to people. She travelled all around the country. Everywhere she was known for the good quality of her merchandise. Her prices were fair. For seven cents she improved the quality of dreams, for nine cents she wrote love letters, for twelve cents she made up terrible insults. She sold also stories, long reality based narratives which she told fluently, without leaving anything out.

Belisa´s narratives brought news from one village to the other. People paid her to add a couple of events into her narrative: a child has been born, our children have got married, so-and-so has died, the harvest has got burnt.

Wherever Belisa went people gathered around her to hear her talk. This way they learnt about the life of others, about their distant relatives and about events in the civil war.

Whoever paid Belisa Crepusculario fifty cents could buy a secret word that frightened off melancholy and sadness. It was not the same word for all people - of course not - because that would have been a collective betrayal. Everyone who received his or her own word could be sure that no one else in the whole universe used the same word.

I have long admired Belisa Crepusculario. We are colleagues. She is a role model for me. Lately my normal life has meant that I spend my days searching and collecting ideas, dressing them into words, phrases and sentences that would make pictures and films in other people´s minds, and all the time making my best effort to get everything wrapped up in a nice marketable form - ready to sail on the blue ocean markets of organizational training. The central topics around which all this has been taking place are tacit knowledge and theories of learning and teachning. The language is English. A special tribute is paid to Ikujiro Nonaka, Barbara Czarniawska, Kenneth Gergen, Vilma Hänninen etc.

As human beings we look for meanings. If none is found, we start inventing some. We enter in the world of plots and stories. The real trick happens when we, as human beings, set our stories side by side and start comparing them. A Finnish poetess Edit Södergran refers to this in her poem

You looked for a flower
and found a fruit.
You looked for a well
and found a sea.
You looked for a woman
and found a soul -
I disappoint you.

Buscabas una flor
y encontraste un fruto.
Buscabas una fuente
y encontraste un mar.
Buscabas una mujer
y encontraste un alma -
estás decepcionado.

Edit Södergran reminds me of Belisa Crepusculario. She lived in the Finnish speaking countryside, but her native tongue was Swedish - the variation of the Swedish language that is spoken in Finland and that has been strongly influenced by Finnish. In these circumstances Edit Södergran learned to weigh and appreciate individual words and their possibilities to be related to one another. - Sometimes exactly the things you do not have become your long-term treasures.They may even last from one generation to another.

What does all this have to do with normal life in Finland? The quickly and steadily approaching winter goes on undressing the nature and emptying space for itself to settle in. Everyday Finland resembles more and more the poems by Edit Södergran and Eeva-Liisa Manner (maybe you still remember her poem "If grief smoked earth would be shrouded in smoke."). As a result of this we will have a lot of emptiness and space where you can install your meanings. However, one interesting aspect of this is that your cerebral and sensory-motor systems will simultaneusly become slow-motion operated. Because of this you may not find any reasons, why you should be actively looking for the special excitement of establishing new connections between what is and what might also be.

Anyway, if you want to have some concrete usefulness of reading this text, it might be a nice idea to know one more thing. Provided you are spending your youth as an Erasmus student here in Finland and provided you would like to fall desperately in love with a girl having an academic background, it might be worth remembering a couple of sentences from the poems by Edit Södergran and Eeva-Liisa Manner. They have a certain exchange value in the market of affects and emotions.

It is also worth knowing that Belisa Crepusculario´s family was poor. They were so poor that they could not even afford having names for their children. This meant that she had to search for a suitable name for herself. One day she found the name Belisa Crepusculario and she dressed it on.

In case you want to know more about my colleague Belisa, you can meet her in the book Cuentos de Eva Luna by Isabel Alende ISBN: 84-8450-509-X).

What you are dressed in might be worth exploring as well. Have a nice weekend!

There was no French Revolution

2007-10-12T11:52:00.001-07:00

"He lived just from autumn until Christmas."

How do you know which nation you belong to? You can´t be a member of any nation without being able to recognize some special "signs" that bind people together to form exatly that particular nation. Among those commonly recognized "signs" binding individuals to become nations are sentences like "He lived just from autumn until Christmas." or "As we all know, God is almighty, omnipotent and foresighted." "If grief smoked, earth would be shrouded in smoke."

The third sentence is the beginning of a poem by Eeva-Liisa Manner. She is one of the most important Finnish poetesses. Maybe you would like to know that

If grief smoked
earth would be shrouded in smoke.
Yet this grief too has fire beneath,
my heart burns but does not burn out.

Si la pena humease,
la tierra estaría cubierta de humo.
Sin embargo esta pena también tiene debajo un fuego,
mi corazón arde, pero no se consume.

My second example of the nation-building sentences is: "As we all know, God is almighty, omnipotent and foresighted." It is the opening sentence of the novel The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna. The Unknown Soldier was published in 1954. It was the first book that did not describe the second world war as a heroic battle of heroic soldiers. It was absolutely the first of its kind. It was telling that life in the front was hard, opinions about the war variable, but the goal shared. Ask any Finnish ceo or top manager about their favourite leadership books and The Unknown Soldier will be among them. It is very likely to be number one in the list. Even 95 % of all Finnish teenage boys have read it with pleasure - girls too, but they are likely to have read some other books as well.

Before we changed the currency to euros, we had Finnish marks. The last sentence of the Unknown Soldier was written on the twenty-mark-note: "Hyväntahtoinen aurinko katseli heitä. Se ei missään tapauksessa ollut heille vihainen. Kenties se tunsi jonkinlaista myötätuntoakin heitä kohtaan. Aika velikultia."

If you ever get interested in learning to know normal life in Finland, it is worth finding out what has been written between those two sentences "As we all know, God is almighty, omnipotent and foresighted." and "/.../ Aika velikultia."

Now I have to confess that I do not have the English version of The Unknown Soldier, but I have it in Norwegian. It says first: "Som vi jo alle vet, er Vårherre fremsynt og allvitende over all forstand." and the last: "Solen så vennlig på dem. Iallfall ikke uvennlig. Hadde kanskje tilmed en slags medfölelse med dem. Vennene, stallbrödrene." (Sorry Norwegians for the ö!)

About the Russian version of The Unknown Soldier I know that some parts of the text have been omitted or changed. The Soviet publisher did not like the way we Finns described the war between us. - If you want to do business with the Finns, reading The Unknown Soldier is highly recommendable.

I started this text with the sentence: "He lived just from autumn until Christmas." It refers to Aleksis Kivi He is the first Finnish professional author. What it meant to be a writer before computers can be seen in the manuscripts. Aleksis Kivi was born on the 10.10. 1834 and died in 1872 at Christmas. For several reasons his life is considered to have been sad. If you come to Finland in the beginning of October and stay until Christmas, you easily get an idea how exactly it was.

Practically all the deciduous trees are now bare. Their branches and twigs are scraping the sky that is getting further and further away simultaneously swallowing light, becoming cold and distant-looking. When you get out into the open-air, the wind bites you sharply enough to remind you of the necessity to put on a warm overcoat, gloves, and a cap, lange unterhose etc.

Winter is approaching. Today in the morning we had snow, even here in the south of the country. The soil is still warm enough to melt most of it during the day, but if you left your car out in the open-air last night, you will still find it covered by white, dry and clean snow.

All the scenery changes. Days are getting shorter and shorter. People start dreaming about travelling to the tropics where there is sunshine and palm trees. Those who stay here start talking about the weather: "They had minus twenty centigrade in Jyväskylä." "Oh yes, but in Oulu they had minus thirty-one, and the terrible wind from the sea." - You can be sure that the British talking about their weather will be just amateurs in comparison with us winter-time Finns.

Maybe I´ll share this arctic-hysteria description with you in Spanish. It is a poem by Arvo Turtiainen describing cold January nights with fifty degrees centigrade and the stars biting the bread of the frost. I do not know us ever having had minus fifty - anyway this is not Siberia - but fifty rhymes better than twenty-five, for instance.

50 grados bajo cero

En las noches de enero
crujen dientes de las estrellas
al morder
el pan del frío.

En las noches de enero
navega la luna
como un ataúd
rumbo a su gélido infierno azul.

Los bosques negros
se estremecen.
Se congelan
las cortinas de la aurea boreal.

En las noches de enero
resplandece
el puñal del frío
en la mano de la muerte.

All nations have something that combines people together to form a nation - sentences, poemas, songs, sceneries. To become a member - a fellow citizen - you need to know enough of them. If you do not know any, you have no idea of the normal life of those people, you do not know how they have organised their life and how they want to be communicated with.

By the way, did you know that there never was any French Revolution? People in France lived their normal life. It got overwhelmingly difficult, so they started protesting. There were protests here and there, and as life did not get any better, the protests spread over a longer period of time. Then somebody was looking at the tumultous period from outside and collected all those separate incidents under one name ´revolution´. When people abroad referred to everything happening in France, the ´French Revolution´ was born. If nobody had given that special label to what was happening, we might never have had The French Revolution that became rather a popular export product.

If you want to know more about nations and imagination, you could read Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson (ISBN:0-86091-546-8). It has been translated into Finnish as well. Reading Imagined Communities you´ll learn that we as various nations are invited into the history. In what language, via which signs and sentences, was the invitation card of your nation printed?

Changing Surroundings

2007-10-02T05:38:00.000-07:00

What do you live surrounded by? I mean several alternative, time-related answers - normally, lately, and just now?

Once, long time ago, somebody said to me: "You are surrounded by angels." - I was caught by a total surprise. I still remember how tired and down I was just at that moment. It was in the middle of some general, long-term life hazzle. She just stopped what she was doing, looked at me and said those words. I knew that she was telling the truth. Immediately her words made a nest in my mind. I started wondering why I hadn´t realised the same myself.

Every now and then the general life hazzles make use of different opportunities and show us what we are surrounded by. Sometimes you look at the people around you and instead of seeing just the person, you see the surroundings as well. When I read Tobias´s blog I become convinced that he is surrounded by friends. No matter where he goes and what he does he has numerous and irreplaceable friendships surrounnding him. Maybe he does not realise himself how exceptional that is.

When I look at my 88-year-old mother she is surrounded by gentleness and light. I do not mean that she would be similar to the self-luminous dog created and exhibited by an artist whose name and nationality I have forgotten. It is just that my mother has stopped being and feeling somehow important and anyhow remarkable. She concentrates on enjoying the present moment as it is and not as it should be.

Some time ago I realised that I am surrounded by worries and feelings of guilt. I also realised that it was nothing occasional and temporary. It had become my normal life. When something becomes normal it escapes from sight and becomes in a way invisible. If there is no contrast anywhere, the invisible remains impossible to see. In this case the contrasting or meaning-making idea was my own simple question: Can I afford this? My answer was a short and simple No.

Just at present I am reading about tacit knowledge and educational practices. Research on adult learning reveals that more learning happened in periods that people perceived as good versus bad times. Nearly ten times more significant learning occurred in the good times than in the bad. Anyhow, learning that is likely to be transformative and change your life will occur in bad times.

From the learning point of view it does not matter, whether you feel good or bad. Feeling bad enough is likely to have greater effect on you and change your life, one way or other. You just have to go through a transition process, embark upon the no-man´s land between the old reality and the new. The old way is gone and the new doesn´t yet feel comfortable enough.

It is like autumn in Finland just at present. Days are getting shorter and shorter. All colourful leaves have started to fall down. The nature is breathing deeply before falling to sleep under the snow. If we Finns were just human beings, we would go to sleep as well. However, we are human doings and that makes us go on as if we were equally eneregetic as we are when the days are long and the night is squeezed to its minimum between them.

Now the leaves are slowly falling down, the over-grown grass is covered by yellow, organge and red leaves, we are surrounded by the autumn, in a transition, between the doors, closed-behind and not-yet-open-in-the-front.

Any morning in a couple of weeks´ time there will be first signs of frost everywhere and ice on the roads. Motoristis who haven´t changed winter tyres for their cars before that particular morning, will get into trouble and risk many other people´s lives.

Everybody knows that that special morning is approaching, and anyhow it catches very many Finns by a total surprise, as if it never happened before. Maybe it does not matter what you are surrounded by unless you draw some conclusions of it.

"If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs."

Recognizing Treasures

2007-09-26T11:08:00.000-07:00

If you found a treasure, what would it be? How would you know that it is a treasure? What kind of systems do you use for finding treasures?

My system for finding treasures is public, taxpayer-paid, and at everybody´s disposal - provided you speak Finnish. It is called Radio Yle 1. It provides trigger information that has often proved out very nourishing in many ways.

Luckily we have not lost all radio channels to porridge-tum-dum music cut by headache-provoking nonsense chatting. In Radio Yle 1 we still have knowledgewise ambitious reporters and proper programmes.

My latest catch was the name of an author, Taleb. I heard just the last name. The rest was to be found by a Google search, Taleb Nassim Nicholas, closer still his book the Black Swan (978-0-713-99995-2). The next step was just to tell my wishes to Amazon.com.

Yesterday I went to the post office twice to get the book. The first time was a disappointment, because the parcel was not yet there. The second time was two hours too late. The post office was closed.

Today I got it. - How do I know it is a treasure? Maybe I just pick up a couple of ideas from Taleb´s text. He says, for instance, that life is a cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks:

Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan? (p. xix)

I have always admired achievers who reach goals by following a consciously chosen strategy, who steadily proceed from one goal to the next. Or maybe I should write ´who seem to proceed´.

In the course of the years many strict strategies seem to have fallen apart. What at the first sight looked a relatively smooth path has often turned out to be a couple of handfuls of "significant shocks". Life seems to require great amounts of energy and effort from most of us. What we call ´normal life´ may just look normal - seen from outside.

Perhaps we live our normal-looking lives just for others. We try to show each other that life is going on smoothly and normally. If I asked you how you are, you would not blurt out all that frightens you and makes you panic. You do your best to pretend to be calm and in control.

If we freely and profusely exposed and exchanged our primary worries and fears, the society would get shocked and out of rails. That reminds me that my parents were talking about peace propaganda having been used during the war. It was important that people did not get totally frustrated. When all people agree on pretending life to be normal, it becomes normal. Not pretending normality would be too risky.

What Taleb says in his book is that we have a need to think that life is less random than it actually is.

"Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness." (p.69)

The other day I wrote about Finnish people telling about their unemployment. Taleb says that ideas come and go, stories stay. You may make use of them. For instance, if you work in a randomness-laden profession, you frequently face significant shocks. You are likely to suffer from burnout effects. Keep a diary. That is, according to Taleb, the least you can do in those circumstances. You could also decide beforehand to lump all your pain into a brief period and to spread a steady flow of enjoyment - in the form of small and frequent positive rewards - into your story. Whether you want your story to be a comedy or a hero-story is up to you as well.

I recommend you read The Black Swan to know, for instance, that elephant matriarchs play the role of superadvisers on rare events. We learn from repetition. Events that are nonrepeatable are ignored before their occurence. Linear progression is not the norm. The norm is to be taken by astonishment and suprise.

If you found a treasure, how would you know that it is a treasure?

Umbrella-Stories and Unemployed People

2007-09-21T02:17:00.000-07:00

Until some time ago the umbrella name for all various individual and societal versions of normal life was Modern.

Life becomes concrete by means of our ideas, thoughts, decisions and deeds, but all ideas, thoughts, decisions and deeds are based on meanings. They are preceeded by meanings, they exist as meanings and as meanings they can be modified, altered and changed.

However, meanings are not like Finns who can live isolated and far from each other and who prefer no contact with other people. Meanings form couples, families, networks of friends and business partners. Like Mediterranean people they live always in close contact with other meanings. No matter what specific meaning you would like to modify and re-define, you need to take into account the neighbouring meanings. If you make an effort to do something different, the neighbours nextdoor and futher away start sending messages to you.

If you do not voluntarilty take into account the neighbours´ messages, they will make you do so. An analogical situation takes place when the Finnish police knock on the door of the Spanish post-graduate students of technology having a birthday party at midnight. The noise level of the Spanish birthday conversation would be normal in Spain, but it is considered unacceptable here in Tampere, Finland. Neighbours react first. They alarm the officials and they are obliged to interfere.

Meanings live in families and networks. But it is no random life. Meanings need to be chained. Unless they are somehow chained, they cannot be expressed as talk.

Maybe you are lucky and happy and every now and then make love with someone very, very important to you. That taking place, you know that all meanings are not chainable. There are always meanings that are not reached or covered by words. It is as if they were escaping into the margin, waiting to be expressed in some later occasion, the next opportunity to embrace one another.

Anyway having been lucky, happy and willing to talk you might have exchanged some meanings with the other one. You have succeeded in arranging meanings to form sequences that have brought in some desired results. You know that the haphazard meanings need to be arranged and sequenced to follow some kind of shared logic. If the logic is not shared, communication becomes surprisingly complicated, if not impossible.

My friend is a professor of social psychology. She has done research on how people describe their normal life, what kind of hidden logic there is to be found in their descriptions.

In the 1990´s she interviewed unemployed Finns asking them how their life was. Maybe I need to remind you that we Finns live in the north and we are Protestants. This means that to be an accepted and honourable member of the society you need to work hard. This is due to the natural selection. Lazy people who did not get prepaired for winter have starved and frozen to death thousands of years ago. If you do not think of the future and if you do not get prepaired for the worst of it, you do not survive. This model has been duplicated generation after generation.

Being a Protestant means protesting. You can annoy even the Nature itself by staying alive just by doing the opposite that is expected of you. Instead of getting depressed and tired because of the continous requirement for hard work, you just enjoy working hard. You do it as a protest.

That is important to know, because in the 1990´s we Finns were still authentic. We wanted to work hard. Unemployment was difficult to bear. It was difficult to bear also because of the idea of Modern. Those who have grown up in the post-war world or before that remember that life was getting better and better all the time. Everything was progressing towards a golden future.

My friend writes in her doctoral thesis that the Modern was based on a story, a myth of progress. Every story contains a moral. The moral of the story of the Modern was that rational thinking, science and technology will take the mankind into a world of continous progress and increasing welfare attainable to all people. Unemployment was contradictory to the general theme of everything getting better. It was difficult to fit in into this meaning-making system and therefore unaesthetic and ugly. It was pushed into the margin as if did not exist. Anyhow people faced and experienced unemployment in their own life.

What did my friend find out in her study? She - and some other people before her - found out that the story of the Modern has become outdated. There are too many things in the margin. Besides unemployment we have there starving people, wars, refugees, refugee camps, environmental problems etc. Not all people´s life corresponds to the story of continuous progress and increasing welfare. And as members of a modern northern Protestant democracy we cannot just push aside these people. We need to do the opposite. First we need to listen to them and second we need to find out what we really have heard.

When people were telling about their life as unemployed persons, they were telling stories. There was a plot that their descriptions followed. Some of them were heroes in the battle between the good and the bad. These heroes were set in a public test, fighting an honourable fight and coming out of it as winners. In the end they found a job and the favourable life situation was restored. As heroes they received admiration from others.

For another group of people the unemployment was a tragedy. In a tragedy the protagonist is an innocent, respectable person. He goes on fighting bravely, but has no chances to win. He ends up in a psychological and practical cul-de-sac. We feel pitty for him.

Some people talked about their unemployment as if it were a comedy. In a comedy the protagonist gets into conflict with the society, but he has suppressed resources that he can harness and use when searching for alternative ways of earning the living. It is as if the doors behind had closed and the new doors had not yet opened. This between-the-doors experience may become true as a journey or an adventure. It is a carnevalistic period when the rules governing the normal life are no more valid. During this carnival new things take place and opportunities knock on the door. Besides dreams the protagonist has also weaknesses. Depending on what the he does in real life, the end result may be a criminal story as well as a comedy.

There were also people who questioned all of the above descriptions of unemployment. They saw nothing heroic, tragic or comical in their situation. Vilma Hänninen (ISBN: 951-44-4651-8) classifies this story form as irony.

In an irony the protagonist steps out of the model stories. This means that he ends up in the margin of the margin. His life is not following the umbrella story of the Modern, nor is it in accordance with the culturally shared stories of unemployment. This makes the life difficult, especially if there are debts to pay and family to take care of. It also shows that we really have certain models which we need to follow if we want to live normal life in the particular society we are surrounded by.

As I said before, meanings need to be grouped and chained, they need to be fitted into the plots that our culture offers us. In this way they become stories. The unemployed Finns that Vilma Hänninen interviewed never thought that they were telling this or that type of a story. They were just describing their own life situation. And for doing that, the surrounding culture offered them various alternative models. In the 1990´s the most familiar models were a hero-story and a comedy.

What Hänninen states in her thesis is that the unemployed would have it easier, if we had more alternative story models at our disposal. What we as Finnish society would need is more diversified models for living a good, decent life. However, the only way to get those models is to have people who live them true first. And for doing that you need to follow the hard-working Protestant ethics. You need to know the model stories and how to be a protagonist in good ones. You can be absolutely sure that the easiest and most comfortable way to live here is to work hard and be a hero.

Empty Space in front of Activities

2007-09-20T05:24:00.001-07:00

If you need to call the mayor of the neighbouring city, what do you do first? Do you start making the meal for the night? Do you wash dishes? Do you start prepairing the next big project that is expecting to get started?

Have you ever thought what makes things difficult? I have no reason to avoid making this phone call. I have met the mayor before. He is a matter-of-fact person and he might even remember me. I have just talked with his secretary and as far as I have understood her correctly she is convinced that the mayor is really interested in the idea I want to introduce to him. So - why to waste energy for making the phone call difficult, for stackering barriers in front of the most simple task? If I were my colleague Mika, I would not let my energy get wasted like that. Neither would my friend Asta do that.

Having spent an hour prepairing the evening meal, fifteen minutes for doing the dishes and ten for collecting material for the next project I go on doing a lot of active self-talk. Then all of a sudden I am ready to dial the mayor´s number.

This is what happened: "This is the mayor speaking. I can´t talk with you now. Could you please leave a message. I´ll contact you later."

Every now and then I go and read an old shabby-looking post-it message my daughter has pinned on the wall: "The problems one has in the college are mostly just sentimental crap."

The unknown-to-me United- World-College thinker is right. The only change I would like to make is to replace the word ´college´with the word ´life´.

"The problems one has in life are mostly just sentimental crap."

But maybe the only role of the sentimental crap in life is not just to function as a dumping area for wasted energy. Without that special phone call I might not have anything proper to eat tonight, the dishes would still be accumulating in the kitchen, Mika and Asta would not have got their due amount of remote-controlled admiration for today. Maybe most of the life´s necessities get done just while we are getting ready to do something else, during those curious spaces or rooms of time that preceed various not-yet-activities.

You know that there is always room between thoughts. In the same way there seems to be room in front of not-yet-activities. Maybe that is exactly the room where the normal life takes place.

An alternative interpretation could be to regard the not-yet-time-room as the nest of special creative pushes. Instead of making the phone call - or whatever activity you are putting off - you find yourself suddenly surrounded by tasks and duties which normally lack interest. Just at present they seem most attractive and important to you. What would our normal life be like if the grey and colourless matters of life - doing dishes, cleaning kitchen etc. never got glorified like that?

Peter Englund, a Swedish historian, says that we are not only what we have experienced. We are also what we long for. Some other people have said the same before him.

As human beings we live in a continuous state of expectancy. What we expect to happen affects how we interprete the events and opportunities of every-day life. My friend Edit said once about Christmas time in Madrid that the Advent, el adviento, may be even more exciting than Christmas itself. She, surely, did not think of the Winnie the Pooh who appreciates more the moment before honey than the honey itself. She thought of the future that needs to be filled with dreams that invite us to come there.

Tomorrow I will call the mayor once more. It is just the second time. It will be interestng to see how much preparation that phone call wants to get.

Wish you empty spaces between your thoughts and acitvities!

I just went to the mailbox. I´m expecting to get a very interesting book from Amazon.com. It may deal with expectations as well - which again might awaken expectations in your mind, too.

Pareto Principle in Lapland

2007-09-15T09:21:00.001-07:00

When learning a foreign language you need to build a personal contact with all individual words and expressions. It is an interesting process. You learn to know beautiful, dull, transparent, charming, aggressive, inviting, and disgusting words. Some of the words have a special smell or a taste, some have been exported, imported, smuggled or violated, some have interesting stories to tell.

Did you know, for instance, that they were the Vikings who brought the word ´window´into the English language? The original form ´vindauga´ means wind´s eye. If you know the English word ´husband´ and then meet ´animal husbandry´, you might think it to be something very strange. The strangeness disappears immediately, if you know the basic word is the Swedish ´husbonde´ meaning farmer. That was brought to the British Isles by the Vikings as well.

Words not only tell stories. They build history as well. During my personal history I have learnt to appreciate words like ´technological advances´, ´entrepreneurial attitudes´, ´specifics´, ´characteristics´, ´enthusiasm´ and ´laboratory´. These words, and many others similar to them, play an important economic role in my life.

In the Finnish language we always emphasize the first syllable of all words. It is the normal practice and there are no exceptions to the rule. When learning English we are caught by a surprise - the same rule does not apply for all English words.

When we Finns see words like ´employability´or ´prerequisite´, we are in trouble. We recognize the meaning, but we do not know how to pronounce the word. In written language this does not matter. In normal speech, however, it is quite an irritating limitation. Additionally the native speakers of English do not simply understand you, if you decide to test the Finnish way of pronouncing words like ´employment authorities´, ´hotel´, ´development´, ´competitive´etc.

You probbaly know the Pareto principle: 20% of your intelligence is enough to solve 80% of the problems you have in life, 20% of your customers bring in 80% of your income, 20% of the clothes in your wardrobe cover 80% of the need you have, 20% of all you have learnt is needed for the work you do. Words requiring the shift of emphasis bring in 20% of my income and enjoyment. The rest - 80% - come from all other words and their innumerable combinations, spoken, read and written.

Think that I could really invent something new in the world of words and meanings. Think that I would be able to develop the invention to become a duplicable system. Think that the system would be profitably marketable. That would not only increase my personal income and enjoyment. It would also increase the enjoyment of many other people, and as far as I know what people really enjoy tends to become somehow contagious and spread around as general welfare and prosperity, which again increases creativity and economic activity.

How do I know that? I grew up in the south of Lapland. It was nothing special at that time. People just lived their normal, daily life there. Now Lapland is something special. It has a special magic that captures people and that creates general welfare in the whole region.

In the course of the years Lapland has become a marketable product. It became a marketable product when people realised that the days have a special length - in the winter without light, in the summer without darkness. It became even a better product when people realised that the autumn in Lapland has special colours. You know that every leaf, grass and straw gets its particular red, yellow or orange colour after having been kissed and bitten by the first frosts. Isn´t that something special? Just think about that happening during one night only. In the evening all the scenery is green - more or less the colour of spinach. And in the morning when you wake up, you find yourself in a special world of all flaming reds, yellows and oranges.

Of course this happens everywhere in the world where there are frosts, but what made it a tourist attraction in Lapland is that this specific natural phenomenon has a special name in our Finnish language. It is called ´ruska´.

To me the English equivalent of the concept ´autumn colours´sounds as interesting as ´morning paper´or ´evening meal´. But in Finnish we have now a specific name for clear, magical phenomenon that repeats itself every autumn, a concept that everybody knows. We have ´ruska´. And as we all know a concept can be combined with other concepts. This means, for instance, that we can have ´ruskajazz´, ´ruska fashion´, ´ruska meals´, ´ruska angst´as well as ´ruska coping´.

The only limit for making new combinations is to be found in your creativity. And, as we all know ´ruska´ has a very particular positive influence on your creative resources. Should you ever doubt that, you just need to go to Lapland in the autumn and charge your creative batteries there.

If you could choose, for instance, between ´an autumn colours love affair´and ´ruska love´, which one would you prefer? Just think about ´ruska adventures´ in Lapland, when the nights are getting longer and longer...

Wouldn´t that be worth experiencing?

Maybe, I should also remind you that the Pareto principle 20:80 does not apply above the Arctic Circle. It is quite normal that everything there becomes 100%.

Fact, Fiction and Testimonio

2007-09-08T01:49:00.000-07:00

You need to know this first: We have a Finnish poet, a giant, a person who brought in modernism in the 50´s, and without whose name Finnish poetry cannot be mentioned. We also have a Finnish poetess, important and influential. Anyway, if the layout offers scarce space for any text about Finnish literature his name stays and hers will be omitted from it.

He is Paavo Haavikko. She is Eeva Kilpi.

- By the way, the Finnish language has long ago dropped out the genre differences of the type ´poet-poetess´, ´actor-actress´. Both Haavikko and Kilpi are referred to as ´runoilija´. If I used just their last names and the epithet ´runoilija´you would have no idea about the sex difference. Language does not make it, it is made somehow else.

Eeva Kilpi has a poem in which she refers to the difficulty of writing poetry. She defines her problem shortly and clearly: "Haavikko sanoi sen jo." "Haavikko has already said it."

Maybe you have sometimes faced a similar type of problem. Everyhting has already been said, done or invented.

The other day I dropped in into the city library. Once more, the librarians had chosen books to display at the end of the long shelves. One of them was Tunnustus and todistus (ISBN: 978-952-495-005-3), Confession and Testimony in English. Reading an article about Roberta Menchú invited my mind to visit my dear friend Lorena in Venezuela. Lorena is a specialist in realismo mágico.

The article I was reading referred to two texts. One is the original text Nimeni on Rigoberta (My name is Rigoberta, Burgos, Elizabeth (ed.), Spanish original 1983). The other one is an article Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll (1999).

In the book 23-year-old Rigoberta tells about her own life as it has been - and not only about her own life, but about the life of all poor people in Guatemala as it is. Stoll says that Rigoberta´s story cannot be the story of all poor Guatemalans. He also says that her story is not a story about the people fighting for their freedom and against centuries-old oppression. Instead her story is a story of the leftist groups fighting against the conservatives. It´s a political text.

Why would this be important and worth telling? Rigoberta offers us her story as an authentic description of what has taken place, what is true, what is normal among the poor in the country. However, Stoll points out that all she is telling has not taken place exactly in the way it is told. It could have taken place like that, but in fact it did not.

This brings into consideration, political, literary and philosophical viewpoints. The political discussion is centered on the controversy between the left and the right. The literary considerations refer to the difference between fact and fiction. As to the philosophical perspective Stoll says that the text is not true in the sense we in the west normally think of the truth. The fourth point is connected to this. And it is serious. Stoll namely points out is that Rigoberta´s story, her special testimonio, became a Kodak and a Xerox of the concept of testimonio. Rigoberta´s story happened to become the original story in accordance to which we have defined the whole concept of testimonio. In other words it started xeroxing testimonios.

If this took place in business life, it would mean the greatest possible marketing success. If your product name would be used as a generic name for all similar type of products, you would dance for joy. But now it happened in the field of research. It was scandalous. If you start doing research that should give true and objective results, the premises ought to be true and objective as well. Every one of us has learnt that at school. It is a rule.

The rule of the truth cannot be changed. So you have to change something else.

Maybe you have read texts similar to Rigoberta´s story. You have read novels and you have read anthropological case studies. The relationship between the reader, writer and the protagonist is different depending on whether you are reading a novel, an anthropological case study or a testimonio. The article written by Heikki Kujansivu claims that testimonio does not support the existing literary institute. It works outside it and against it. This must have some consequences. Maybe Lorena knows more about them...

Kujansivu says in his article that testimonio gained popularity, because North Americans had gradually got tired of the realismo mágico. If something becomes popular enough it cannot be pushed aside just like that. In the 60´s - 70´s Kuba decided to form a new category of literary prizes. Alongside fact and fiction they took the third category of testimonio.

A testimonio is a story of the size of a novel. The story is told by a protagonist who has been an eye-witness to some specific events or to a specific way of life. The story is told by the protagonist but it may be written down by somebody else, a researcher or a professional writer. The protagonist herself may be illiterate. This means that a testimonio as a literary form gives a voice to people who never had it before. When reading a testimony we are listening to somebody whose identity "contains" parts of the identity of some marginalized group. This means that we learn about normal life in some specific circumstances.

Maybe we should now ask where all - I really mean all - new things come from. As far as I know, they always come from somewhere outside, from the margin. Here, too, I mean always.

The interesting thing here is that normal in some specific circumstances equals margin in some other circumstances. All in all this is something we could be happy about, because no matter how much and how well Haavikko has said something, he never said it all. There is always something left for Eeva Kilpi and Rigoberta as well. If there is a centre, there is also something that can be defined as a margin. And that is where the New will come from.

Young Adults and Baby-Swimming

2007-09-05T09:15:00.000-07:00

Have you sometimes thought what various things and matters are for?

I have just heard what young adults´ mothers are for. It is a simple thing: The children move away from home to live on their own. Time passes and suddenly all their daily property and official papers return back home. They themselves go and live somewhere far away. Now mothers become gardians of all bags, boxes and papers. That is what they are for now. At first this looks simple. However, if you happen to belong to the category of young-adults-moving-somwhere-away, you had better know a couple of things.

One is that all your bags and boxes are very welcome back home. Looking at them accumulating dust and cobwebs gives your mother a strange feeling of still-fully-meaningful existence.

Maybe I should give you a graphic explanation for this: Imagine a continuum describing your life. The present moment is a special point at the right hand end. The continuum goes on beside that point, but we have no precise idea how everything will take place. The future is intimately combined with your dreams. And your dreams become true plan by plan, decision by decision. Without dreams you cannot make plans, without plans you cannot make decisions. You had better have dreams, the bigger the better.

Some point on the extreme left hand side of the continuum your mother had a strange-feelingswise similar type of experience when compared with the present feeling at the right hand end of the continuum. That experience was there, when you were just a vague but insistent dream in her mind, when you were not yet born. That feeling became visible in the form of toys. Your mother - and maybe also your father - started buying toys, just in case they would be needed one day. They were probably just those toys that you first broke in your life.

All right, your bags and boxes are heartly welcome. They stay quietly in various corners of the house accumulating dust and cobwebs. Your papers and projects are a different thing. It is namely likely that your papers and projects have a restless and communicative character.

Some papers and projects require contact with other papers and projects. Sometimes these requirements appear suddenly and without any warning. This makes your mother really wish you were personally present and taking care of them yourself. That is when your mother concentrates her thoughts very intensively on you. This again makes you subconsciously feel that you have roots, your existence is highly valued, and your problem solving skills are greatly appreciated.

One more thing that you as a young-adult-moving-somewhere-away need to know is that your mother has a nose. She uses it for smelling your clothes. It may take her a couple of days to collect the energy and start picking up your clothes from the floor, from under the bed, from armchairs, from over-filled wardropes the doors of which cannot be closed any more etc. In other words from wherever your haphazard mind has dropped something.

Having collected enough energy to start collecting your clothes she takes every single piece of them, lifts it to her nose level and presses her nose deeply into it simultaneously inhaling all possible smells that the particular piece of clothing may have. It is a very analytic process. Your mother draws quick and definite conclusions of all activities, contacts and habbits connected with each particular piece of clothing and your life.

It would be very difficult for an outsider looking at the process to define the versatility of the analysis. Maybe an outsider would think that your mother is a kind pervert or somehow out of her normal state of mind. Anyway we can consider all this to be normal, if we remember that your mother is your history. Picking up shoes from the floor the size of which approaches that of a violin case, she remembers your newly-born tiny toes that smellt roses and asked to be kissed. Picking up your present adult size swimming suit she remembers how you were taken to baby-swimming and how she was crying on the previous night, because the baby was starting sports and simultaneously starting to go away from her.

You know that as human beings it is not enough for us to research life as it is now. As human beings we want to know how it all began. Was it a big bang, or was it not. Normal is not enough. We want to have more, no matter whether it is behind or ahead of us. And when you come back home you can smell all your clothes yourself. They have been washed and folded to form neat piles. They, too, are waiting for you.

What Makes a Family?

2007-09-02T04:45:00.000-07:00

The normal life of this summer has started to change - steadily and definitely.

Laura is moving to St Petersburg. Today. Tomorrow she needs to attend some lectures at the university. I miss the moments we have spent in various cafés talking about this and that.

Laura belongs to the very few people whom know to see the world with an authentic curiosity and who are able to look at their own curiosity with curious eyes. The enjoyable outcome of that is joyous and repetitive laughter you can join in when in her company.

Samuli is getting ready to go to Bosnia tomorrow. He has packed his summer life spent mostly in Grandmother´s cottage. Now he is waiting to be in big enough of a hurry to get to Helsinki by train. His car prefers summer life. It does not want to start. In fact, it should know that the distance from the cottage to the side of our house is just one kilometre. It must prefer hot and dry summer weather to this rainy and grey autumn Sunday and the ones coming after this.

Luckily the clouds go by. I just received a message from a friend of mine congratulating me for my name day - el santo in Spanish. However, our Finnish names seldom have any reference to any saints and if they had we would not recognize it. This is due to the fact that, by defintion, being Protestants we are in the continous process of protesting. No matter what you say or suggest, we start thinking and finding out how to think and do that particular thing in a different way. And it is not enough just to think and do differently, we also need to be able to explain the logic for the choices made.

According to European Union plans and decisions we are now spending a special year of intercultural dialogue. There is an interesting article in today´s paper referring to this topic. The author, Olli Löytty, states that we can have various kinds of arrangements that facilitate intercultural dialogue. For instance, we can have festivals where Finns drink alcohol, Germans eat bratwurst, and people from Senegal beat drums. We can also have multimedia art happenings where Karita Mattila sings, Osmo Rauhala paints art and Juha Seppälä writes texts.

Intercultural dialogue is absolutely possible as far as we define ´culture´narrowly enough. But if we take the concept of culture to cover what we consider to be the normal way of life, intercultural dialogue becomes problematic, if not totally impossible. If culture means, for instance that Christian people - and especially us Protestants in the north - work hard, Muslims demonstrate fanatically and Jews count the money, then peaceful intercultural dialogue is no more possible.

Cultural differences exist. They are concrete. They awaken immediate and often uncontrollable reactions. I´ll take an example: We had the very great pleasure of learning to know a Chinese family. We became good friends. Their son Ang grew up together with my own children. They played folk music together, had their own orchestra etc.

Once the children were having lunch at my kitchen table. I asked if anybody wanted to have some more. "Yes please. I´ll have some more, if I can eat in Chinese. But if I have to eat in Finnish, I just can´t have any more." Antti said.

"Antti, please, eat in Finnish!" my own ten-year-old son demanded. If you ever have read Calvin and Hobbes, you know what it means to teach acceptable table manners to little boys. By that age my son had obviously internalized some bits and pieces of good table manners. I was satisfied, of course. - However, Antti having spent a lot of time outside of his own Chinese family-culture, had learnt two alternative ways to behave. He was able to make choices in accordance with the current enviroment.

Samuli got his rucksacks made and left for Bosnia. He´ll work there until Christmas, at least. Seela is coming back from Argentina at the end of this month. She comes home and probably goes to live on her own, somewhere in town. "Have you some disagreements with your mother?" she had been asked in Argentina when she had told that she does not necessarily live at home.

What is there behind and below that question? Cultural differences. Different definitions of what we mean by proper family life. In Finland physical presence does not necessarily belong to the nuclear concept of proper family life after children have passed their teens. Having some important things in common does. What is important depends on the requirements of every specific moment. I have received phone calls from Italy and Norway that have made the concepts of family unity and proper motherhood very clear - and dear - to me.

One example from Italy: "Mother, please I do not have enough money for the bus ticket now. Could you put some money into my bank account. The bus is just arriving."
Another example from Norway: "Mother, please what do we need to do to give a lecture that everybody would listen to and take part in? Previously outstanding experts have been lecturing about very important topics and people have not paid attention to them. How can we improve the situation? "

Vow, have I felt being a proper mother when reacting to those and other similar requests!

Families are of many kinds. One definition for a family used by Finnish social workers is very matter-of-fact: people who use the same refrigerator are considered to form a family.

As my family lives in different countries and continents, that definition does not suit to us. We need a new definition. To tell the truth, I´m presently testing a new definition. My lovely and lovable daughter says: "We are a family, because we read the same blog in the Internet."

Dreams in a Book

2007-08-26T01:56:00.000-07:00

"If you were a relationship-type of a person, you would already have one." said my teen-age daughter some time ago. "You would become a marriage-breaker, if you did that." she said some other time when the man´s status would have been the famous not-totally-free.

I have committed myself to a special long-term project. There are several practical matters I can do to ensure its success. One of them is to define my dreams, to collect them as pictures into a special book or folder.

Making a dream book sounds a bit strange, but I know the process to be reasonable. Dreams keep projects alive. Without a dream it becomes impossible to change the status quo of the current life, especially so if you have passed the wild and adventurous years of your life. Dreams help us to define the goals and objectives and they in turn help us to decide what to do next. Just think how many times a day you decide what to do next!

Planning does not make anything concrete. Decisions do. Since June I have been planning to tidy up my car. However, until this very moment those plans have been pushed aside by my decisions to do something else - writing, for instance.

I have cut pictures of my dreams from old English and Spanish magazines. I have found out that defining dreams is easy as far as they are big enough and far-away enough. When they get closer to what I normally consider to be attainable I start to hesitate: "Do I really want that? What would it mean in practice to reach for this or that dream?" The step towards decisions starts to look frightening.

Obviously the process goes down to the question: "Who would I be if I did all that? Would I recognize myself?" In other words, dreams question your identity. When consciously defining your dreams, you start thinking who you are now and who you could also be - in the future. If the the possible identities look and feel too strange to you, you are not yeat ready to reach for them.

Being a marriage-breaker was not a tempting identity. It was very easy to cut the sprouts and roots of that relationship at the very beginning. If I now had an opportunity to become a relationship-type of person, what would I do?

I found a picture for my dream book that would have represented a relationship. I decided to put it aside. It is not in included in my folder.

The other day I had a nice talk with my book keeper. She asked if I have considered selling the house and moving into a flat. It would lower the housing costs.

She is not the only one to ask about selling the house. My normal answer is that the house is my children´s property. "And you are just a janitor." one of my friends commented on that.

Well, I´m not a very good janitor, as the house would need continuous repair. Anyway, what my book keeper was suggesting was what we normally do: We rather diminish the dreams than start changing the situation to correspond the original dream-size. Rather than selling the house I want to create ways to increase the income. And that needs to be fun!

What size are your dreams now? What is happening to them in the long-run? - Dreams are the stuff the future is made of. What have you decided to do next?

August Nights and Newton´s Head

2007-08-21T04:01:00.000-07:00

This year my apples have a special character and a specific interest. They are looking for Newton´s head. In the dark and warm August evenings you can hear a soft ´thummmp´ when they drop themselves down one by one. After that they hide among the grass. That makes it impossible to mow the lawn.

It is not normal to have empty apple trees at the end of August. Letting the grass grow wildly under them is normal, but unreasonable. The amount of work gets multiplied. However, simultaneously the undone work is bridgeing the empty space between the present and the future. You know that one day you have to take measures and mow the lawn - or cut the grass.

If we think that the present needs to be bridged via concrete events with the future, then it is not unreasonable to accumulate predictable matters as a bridgeing material. The only risk is that there might be some other events wanting to enter your life and these delayed activities might push them aside and prevent their materialization.

Anyway the garden smells apples and the falling apples make a nice and soft ´thummmp´ when not hitting Newton´s head. If you were a composer, you could have a theme and variations: Darkening August Nights in Finland a) Apples hiding in the grass, and b) The apple hitting the head.

Today I got a phone call that hit my head. Normally we bridge the empty inexistence between the present and the future with concrete every-day obligations and maybe spice and decorate the path with some dreams. Some of us prefer big dreams to normal obligations. Maybe most of us are content with obligations only, until they - slowly and surely - become boring. When we have accumulated enough of the boring items we might realize - suddenly and surprisingly - that life has reached a Wendpunkt, a turning point. All you need is a sparkle to intitatite a change. Sometimes the sparkle is you. I´ll give you an example of this:

A friend of mine called in spring to ask if I knew somebody who could come and teach German in her school for a while. Of course I knew somebody. I had just recently met an old friend of mine and heard that he had started studying German at the university. Of course, he was happy to work as a subsitute teacher. Of course, he enjoyed the job. Like all fresh teachers - he is fresh, but not exactly young any more - he started to re-develop the educational system, or at least the language teaching part of it, and especially German language teaching. And equally of course, he fell in love with the person he was substituting.

Here you can add another layer of of-course-events: the reaction of the wife, moving away from home and moving back again etc. However, the present situation may perhaps not be classified among the most frequent solutions.

Normally they are the children who are in the focus of the mutual time sharing and practical life arrangements of a divorcing couple. In this case it is different. What my friend tells me is this:

"In my household the time sharing arrangements are not focused on the children, but on the newly arrived partners. Now it´s my turn to spend the night with my lover. Your turn will be tomorrow. - There is also another special feature in this situation. Instead of having one black sheep and quilty person in the family, we now have two. It means a kind of balance."

They say that it is never too late to have a happy childhood. Any of your bright and feasible ideas may have consequences that may or may not be revealed to you. In spring I felt happy helping my friend to find a subsitute teacher in a two days´notice. I was especially happy, because the school was content with his work. But what should I feel now, when we have four middle-aged adults listening to the soft ´thummp´of the falling apples in the warm and darkening August nights? It is totally out of the reach of my imagination to think of all these events may - or may not - ignite and be a sparkle for.

We can pretty exactly track the consequences of the apple having hit Newton´s head. But the absolute majority of apples fall on the grass just saying ´thummmp´.

What Type of a Fairy Tale?

2007-08-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

"My life is a fairy tale." says the young man. "It´s not easy, but it is like a fairy tale." he repeats. He has his own business. Its name is Menestystuote, Success Products. He tells to me that he cannot invite recently met girls to visit his home. The luxury they would see there could tempt them to like him more than they otherwise would.

Sometimes you meet people you´ll never forget. I met the above young man years ago on a train from Tampere to Oulu. If I now saw him somewhere I wouldn´t regocnize him any more. Anyway I remember him every time when my own life starts to get somehow strange.

It is quite interesting to think when exactly that going-strange happens. When life somehow gets out of phase we know it automatically. Something points it out. We have specific indicators that identify deviations from the normal state of affairs. My personal deviation indicators talk. They use the young man´s sentence: "My life is like a fairy tale. It´s not easy, but it is like fairy tale." When I hear that in my head I start looking back at what has happened lately.

In the morning I had a business appointment in town. The weather was sunny and warm. It´s only about three kilometres to the city centre. I chose the luxury way of travel and decided to cycle there. Never have I arrived so totally soaked and wet at a business meeting as today.

Having come back home I had to prepare marketing material and collect the addresses of this special target group. Now I understand why the person looked so happy when I promised to do that. If one of the addresses doesn´t work, you don´t know which one it is and the message never leaves your own computer. Little by little your eyes and neck start to protest for looking for the error.

We have a Finnish fairy tale called The Birch and the star: A war has been destroying the country. Children have been sent abroad to live there. Everything in the new country is nice and peaceful, but the boy and the girl miss home. They want to go back. They walk and walk and walk. One day they come to a small humble cottage. They see a birch growing at the gate and they see a star in the foliage of the birch. This sight, the birch and the star, is all they remember of their former home. Now they know that they have arrived back home. They know they will feel happy here. They need not search for anything more. - If you mention The birch and the star, all Finns know what you are referring to.

Dogs´meaning making system seems to work in the same way as ours does. Both of us can make things insignificant by just ignoring them. My dog Uffe streched this quite to the extreme. Moving cars were in no way important to him. He had decided to ignore them and might have lost his life because of that decision. Moving cars had no meaning, but cars standing still were worth paying attention to, because they could be used as a means of transport and tourism.

While walking down the hill to meet a neighbour of mine I met another neighbour. We spent some time talking about Uffe and the evanescence of life. Her dog was the only one that Uffe considered important enough to pay attention to. Uffe insisted on being the king of the quarter and so did her dog too. I think that they just showed mutual respect by heavily barking at each other a couple of times every time one or the other passed the other one´s house. Obviously the message was: "I bark at you, because you exist. If I did not bark at you, you would not exist in my world. I prefer that you exist."

What made my life look like a fairy tale today? Something in the above events? All feelings are triggered by something special. Today´s trigger event was embedded in the business meeting.

Now I have a very interesting project to manage for a pay that has no reasonable relation to the amount of work already done for its success. For such a low pay, it had better turn out to be a long-term investment. Anyway, it is one of my long-term professional dreams come true. Shimmering stars are becoming beams of light. Instead of individual impact training we´ll now have processes. They are initiated by the client organizations, but controlled by those people who really do the work. And you know how empowering that is. Long live Internet!

The young man on the train had a successful and profitable business. "Are you now more serious with your business?" my newly re-found Chinese friend asks. Maybe I should learn not to mix up a way of life and business. Maybe the looking-for-the-birch-and-the-star as a strategy has become outdated and insufficient. Perhaps I had better change over to some other fairy tale to get some luxury items around me. What would you think about Simbad the Seafarer?

"Simbad zarbaba rumbo a islas habitadas por desconocidos de conducta imprecedible y por aves extrañas/... / Lo único predecible de los siete viajes que realizó Simbad fue que, gracias a que entabló comunicatión con otros extraños, ya fuesen humanos, aves o monstruos marinos, el marino se enriqueció y fue cada vez más feliz." (Fatema Mernissi: Un libro para la paz, ISBN: 84-7669-663-9)

If life every now and then reminds you of its fairy tale character, why not choose the type of fairy tale you want to be in. So far, I´m not surrounded by luxury nor haunted by abundant income, which in Finland means that you can invite anybody to visit you. That is the positive in it. But if using the-birch-and-the-star-strategy means that you´ll be haunted by the lack of income, it is certainly more clever to change the fairy tale. Simbad the Seafarer does not sound bad, does it?

What kind of imaginable - and profitable - opportunities can you find in the triangle blue oceans, your expertise and the Internet? Who do you need to co-operate with to make the opportunities become true?

Pigeons and hens

2007-08-09T13:18:00.000-07:00

"As human beings we we only see what we remember." the lecturer says.

My hairdresser has returned from her summer holiday. It is a pitty I do not have one specific picture of her hairdressing saloon from last summer. The door was open to the street. I entered. She was washing a client´s hair. On the floor there was a saucer, some seeds and a pigeon having a nice lunch. The pigeon was not expecting any more clients to come, but that being the case, she moved by side to let me in. Then she went on enjoying her lunch.

At that time I had just been reading Number One Ladies´ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. What I now saw with my own eyes here in Tampere, had been seen by Alexander McCall Smith in Botswana.

In Tampere the scene was a hairdressing saloon housing one experienced hairdresser with her long-established client. In Caborone the events take place in the office of Mma Ramotswe, the first female detective of the country. The other person is Mma Makutsi, the manager of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors and the assistant detective at Number One Ladies´ Detective Agency.

In Tampere we have a pigeon, while in Caborone the animal life is represented by a hen. However, there is one thing in common in these two pictures and that has to do with the author who describes the event. For one reason or another, both of them find the incident worth mentioning.

Maybe McCall Smith mentions it because seeing a hen walking somewhere in the outskirts of Caborone is something you could expect to see. It is more or less normal. Here in Tampere seeing a pigeon anywhere indoors is an absolute exception, seeing one enjoying her lunch in a hair dressing saloon is a once-in-a-life-time event.

Sorry, I do not have any picture of this, but I think that by now you have a picture, or a series of pictures, describing the event in your mind. Environmental art is like that. It exists in a visible form, it has spatial characteristics and an effect on the space and surroundings where it is located, it refers to change and movement, it is multisensory and it calls for a spectator reaction. As time passes an individual piece of environmental art fades away from where it was located, but it stays in the spectators´mind. You carry it with you and you can refer to it.

Maybe you now have a pigeon-hen; hairdressing saloon-detective´s office; two Finnish ladies - two African ladies event constructed in your mind. The African ladies are traditionally built and so are the Finnish ladies too. The sun is shining and the room is hot. The activity is directed towards a specific achievement. There is an outsider - an author or an artist - looking at the event, registering it for a later use.

We have pictures in our mind. We can change and mould them. We can connect them with anything else in our mind. Anyway, as far as I know, the result is not any environmental piece of art for one simple reason - the artist did not announce publicly that he or she is now starting to make piece of art. In that sense a piece of art embodies ownership, the artist has to take responsibility for what she wants to do. She also needs to be prepared to explain, defend and interpete the choices made.

All right. Let´s go back to the beginning: seeing is a learnt. Practically we see what we expect to see.

My hairdresser has a five-year old granddaughter. She was visiting her grandparents. All of a sudden she started crying, was in a total panic and wanted to go back home. Grandfather felt totally helpless with a reaction like that. Grandmother - my hairdresser who has for years actively worked for the Catastrophe Centre for Abandoned Cats, who normally has a couple old dogs and occasionally twelve to sixteen cats in her home - did all her best to find out what was wrong with the panicing child. The question "What happened?" resulted in a not-too-clear explanation that the child had been on a balcony. "What happened there? Did you perhaps see something?" revealed that the child had really seen something strange. "What exactly did you see?" "I saw a very small lady."

The grandmother finds out that the child had seen a small lady walking away from the house. She had fair hair like grandmother. Only the hairdo was different. She was the size of a big doll. And the frightening element was that the child did not know, if what she had seen, was a real event or just a fairy-tale.

A normal, five-year-old is an intelligent person. Maybe you know some of them. He has just found out that there was some life in the family before "you found me." A five-year-old wants to take part, he wants to help others and organise things. Once I found brand-new gloves and one of the finger tips had been cut open with scissors. I was astonished and asked what had happened. "I cut it out just to mark whose gloves they are." my five-year-old son explained in his very matter-of-fact way of those days.

A five-year-old has just recently learnt what is normal. She knows that normal life is made up of concrete events and it is performed by people and animals of a certain size and form. Now, all of a sudden, she sees with her own eyes something that is totally out of proportions. A picture of a small fair-haired lady of the size of a big doll does not correspond to the reacently learnt idea of the normal life. It is a message from somewhere not-real. To panic in situation like that to react normally.

When the child´s story comes out, the grandmother slowly finds out what must have taken place. In their neighbourhood there lives a lady who never grew up to reach the same size as the rest of us adults have done. Grandmother had simply frogotten to tell the child about this special family. The approximate explanation did not help. The child did not calm down until hearing that the lady in question has recently got a baby and she and her husband live happily not too far from the grandma´s.

What could we learn from this? Firstly, it is not before we learn to know enough similarities in one another´s life that we can stop fearing each other. Secondly, what we percieve needs to be connected to something we know beforehand, preferably with something we feel to be safe, nice and normal. Thirdly, it is very difficult to be prepared for all the exceptions that life offers us.

Taxis and Grandma´s Candles

2007-08-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

"Everyone of the eleven taxis that passed the lady at the roadside without stopping to help her should be prosecuted for exposition." my friend says to the taxi driver. The taxi driver stops the car immediately. He tells her to get out of the car.

"You were exposed as well!" I say to my friend. "Yes, but it did not matter, because it was so near my house." "Did you inform the police?" "No, I didn´t. It´s not worth doing. The taxi driver would have said that I had been making trouble. If you are alone, the taxi driver always wins. Had there been another person with me, I would have called the police."

Today I remembered the above conversation from the end of June. I went to see a friend whom I hadn´t visited before. We meet every now and then in the department store where she works. For a long time now she has been one of the important persons who make the life worth living and the town feel my home.

You certainly have some people in your life that are important to you because of the profession they have. In her professional role she says to me: "You need not waste your time now. We have nothing for you to wear." or "Come here. This jacket suits you perfectly." But what has become much more important to me are our conversations - how is your daughter, where shall you travel for your holiday etc.

Some time ago I realised that not only my personal well-being but also my personal existence is totally dependable on my own presence and existence in other people´s lives. If I do not exist in anybody else´s life, I do not exist anywhere else either. Having realised this, it was very alarming that even the Finnish Taxation Office had left me out of their registers. As I am a very happy tax-payer, I felt worried and perplexed. You know this feeling: I´m a useless outsider, nobody needs me, even my income is not worth anything. - That is exactly when I decided to go to people and tell them that I appreciate my own presence and existence in their life. This project is still going on. Yes, you, too, are important to me.

Last time when I met Tuula there were customers around. We could not talk much. She hardly had time to tell me: "No, you haven´t seen me, because I have been on a two months´ sick leave. My daughter was murdered. You remember the newspapers told about a young lady having been found by side of the road in X. It was my daughter. She has three little sons, a nice husband, a happy marriage. It was the first time for seven years she had gone out with her friends... Sorry, I need to go. We have to see later..."

Normal life in Finland - or anywhere else - does very little to prepare us to events like that. You realise that there is very little to say. You start thinking of what could be really important after any tragic incident. Maybe you think of the children that are hurt. And when you are thinking of the children you are thinking of the future.

Today we had time to talk. So far, practically nothing is known about what took place that night. She was a beautiful, young fair-haired lady. She would never have left her handbag and overcoat in a restaurant in winter-spring when we still have some snow everywhere. Obviously something was put into her drink. Cameras show that she was followed by two dark men. However, emphasizing that piece of information is risky as the police will immediately be accused of racism if they do so. As far as I know, eleven taxis passed her daughter later on when she was somewhere outside the town. They cannot be prosecuted either.

My friend in the taxi is a highly qualified professional in restaurant business. She knows the rules of night life. When she referred to this special case, the driver refused to drive further and left her at the roadside. Why did he feel so deeply offended? Does collective guilt hurt as much as individual guilt does?

If you leave anybody out without proper winterclothes in the Finnish winternight, you practically murder him or her. Everybody knows it. All taxis know it. Every one of them has the duty to stop and ask what is going on. Nobody did.

There are too many things here that are out of the range of the normal. My friend Tuula is going to inform the police about what happened to the other friend of mine. Maybe it helps them, maybe it doesn´t. The basic question Tuula and her family have now is: When does the individual guilt hurt much enough to break out as confessions?

While waiting for that, the eldest son will start school, the middle one will become prescholar and the youngest one knows that of the two tall candles they always lit at their grandparent´s house the taller one is for mother. She has a taller candle, because she was so much more beautiful than the father is.

Hypnosis and Normal Scenery

2007-08-02T04:10:00.000-07:00

My Spanish friend Eldha calls me: "Viene una amiga de mi amiga Paloma a Tampere. ?Puede quedarse en tu casa?" "Claro que puede. ?Cuándo viene?" "El sábado." "Muy bien. Díle que es bienvenida."

Eldha calls me on Wednesday. She has no further information. She does not know exactly who is coming. It must be one of the two very good friends of Paloma.

I´m very happy and hope she´ll stay at least a week. We´ll have time enough to plan something interesting and my Spanish gets activated.

On Friday I have to call Eldha to ask at what time I need to be at the airport. "Sorry, they are not coming on Saturday. They´ll come on Monday." Eldha explains. "All right. How many people are coming?" "Well, it´s Flavia and her two children." "Fine, I´ll meet them on Monday."

Children coming! They certainly want to go to the amusement park. The only problem is that there´s no room in the house, since Seela´s and Samuli´s furniture, loudspekares, books, boxes, plastic bags and sacks are spread everywhere. "This house is like a central warehouse." Samuli says, although all rooms can be entered carefully walking along a narrow path in the middle of all objects.

My mind starts scanning the situation: "I have to tell people that the house is so full of books, boxes and broken chairs that I can´t find a place for two children to sleep. It´s unforgivable. I have to do something."

On Sunday morning I start to work: books from the sofa and floor into bookshelves, broken chairs into the garage, piles of paper into boxes, boxes into the basement etc, etc. I work the whole day. By five-thirty I have one room empty and the basement more or less in order. Tomorrow I´ll have time enough to put away a sofaful of Seela´s clothes.

When some visitors come at six, the house is clean. There are no heaps of this or that anywhere. There is no smell of dust. I feel really satsified. Tomorrw I´ll go to the airport to meet the visitors.

At nine I get a phone call. It is Flavia, la amiga de Paloma. They are not coming until Friday and they are not planning to come to Tampere at all. They have reserved hotels and cottages, they´ll rent a car and go to Lapland and the Arctic Circle. That´s the normal tourists do.

What a disappointment! The room is waiting for them to come. I had also got used to the idea of going to the amusement park as well. Now Flavia says that her children are twenty-year-old young adults.

It is Thursday today. What is happening? Well, everyhting is getting normal. The house is starting to collect piles of paper, books, clothes and shoes here and there. The smell of dust is returning - slowly, but inevitably.

However, I still have some hope that Flavia and her children will choose the road number three from Helsinki to Jyväskylä instead of choosing the road number four that goes via Lahti.

The road number three is a bit longer, but what does it matter when you are on a holiday. Anyway, the scenery - the normal scenery in Finland - is green forests, a glimpse of a blue or grey lake, more green forests, again a glimpse of a lake and then more forests, green, forests, green, green and a glimpse of blue lake...

Yes, there are houses here and there, but my experience is that Spanish people get hypnotised by the abundancy of the green around them. They fall asleep looking at it. And just when they could see a couple of houses, you hear them snoring slightly. By the time they are awake again, they see some more green forests and an occasional glimpse of a lake...

And anyway, Tampere is worth visiting. You need to choose kesäinen Tampere on the page referred to to see what my city looks like just now. If you want to see the autumn we are very quickly approaching, your choice is syksyinen Tampere...

What have I learnt of this incident? If you want to make me happy, just inform me that some friends of yours are coming for a visit. That makes my mind choose a panopticon look at my own life and surroundings (see especially figure number 16). Expecting to see new friends in a more or less well-organised home is a real and concrete enjoyment! All social pressure coming from outside is not unpleasant at all. It´s interesting to see if Flavia and her children will change their route! They are very warmly welcome - bienvenidos!

A Business School Lesson

2007-07-28T13:12:00.000-07:00

"It´s a very strange book. Every time when you read it, the amount of text has somehow increased." says my friend when I tell her that I am reading Robert Kiyosaki´s Business School one more time (Finnish translation ISBN: 952-468-097-1) .

What have I learnt now? No matter what you want to achieve, you had better be prepaired for rejection. Especially if you want to achieve something people think to be beyond the borders of normality, you will experience very uncomfortable feelings of rejection. Nobody wants to be rejected. It feels uncomfortable. That is why we limit ourselves, we stop trying to achieve anyhting of great personal importance and little by little we give up our dreams. They start getting smaller and smaller to fit inside the borders of what people in general understand to be normal.

Kiyosaki´s advice for avoiding the death of personal dreams is paradoxical. He says that it is just because being rejected feels so unpleasant that we need to look for rejection - supposing you really want your dream to come true. We should be like dandelions in my Slavonic garden. There are a lot of them. In spring-summer they greet me happily here and there. When summer comes they more or less hide away. Only when I have mowed the lawn, feel very content with myself and look back at the result of my work do I see hundreds of individual leaves of dandelions like small Statues of Liberty waving to me: "Happily alive!"

In Finland we have eight seasons. Spring-summer, kevätkesä, is almost everybody´s favourite. It is the time when days are getting longer and longer. Just now the summer is turning towards autumn-summer, syyskesä. When you look at the apple trees you can see that the apples are getting their individual chracteristics. Some are turning red, others yellowish red and some remain green. When the south of Europe is getting ready for their holidays in August, we are returning from holidays to the normal working life routines. In two weeks´ time children will go back to school. Before that happens we get occasional, but regular showers. The sun is shining, it may be warm and all of a sudden it is as if you were standing in a shower.

Have you ever analysed what happens when an object gets a hold of you, when you start wanting to have that specific object? I find that very interesting. You probably have some kind of idea where that kind of catching objects are located. I know some people who have to avoid places where there are handbags or shoes. If they enter those places a couple of handbags beg to come home with them or a pair of shoes might whisper that they may not feel comfortable when walking, but they look very beautiful in the bookshelf. A friend of mine has a beautiful pair of high-heeled Italian shoes on her tv-set, just to look at.

I need to avoid bookshops and art galleries if I want to be sure that no catching objects will get a hold of me. Avoiding art galleries is easier than walking by a bookshop. It does not matter, because books are for learning, earning and living. The money spent on them is deductable in the Finnish taxation system, provided you need the books for earning your living, as I do.

Works of art send us the same expensive signal as books do. They tell us about the abundancy of energy, excessive strength and overflow of vitality - we are here not just to survive, we are here to remind one another of the richness and affluence of life. Today these messages were to be heard on the market place in the city centre. I can relatively easily avoid entering art galleries and exhibitions, but now I was caught by a surprise.

We are having a special Flower Week in Tampere now. There are special flower arrangements in town as well as special events. My friend Leena wanted to go to the city centre, because several art galleries and individual artists had brought mainly graphic art into the market place in the centre - inspite of the occasional showers.

In principle I am broke just now. However, the special feature of the catching objects is that they do not feel any mercy on you. It does not matter if you are broke or not. They just want to come with you. First we decided with my mother to buy a Christmas present for my son Samuli and paid fifty-fifty for it.

Then there was another unique piece of graphic that insisted on coming into my house. I resisted actively. But do you know what this piece of art did - it started using my friend Leena as a negotiator. It made Leena tell me that Robert Kiyosaki says in his book Business School that there are special moments when you need to give yourself the prize first and then after that do the work. It was exactly at that moment when I decided to follow Kiyosaki´s advice. I bought that specific work of art. - It has come into my house. It is special. It is unique. It tells about the abundancy and overflow of energy and vitality in the way all expensive signals do, but anyway I am reading Kiyosaki´s Business School to find out if he really says that the prize should be taken before the work is done. And if he says so, I want to know how often it can be done.

Expensive Signals in the Internet

2007-07-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine has found a new partner via internet. She had published an advertisement and now her life is navigating towards changes. She looks simultaneously content, excited and hesitant. I was curious to hear what has happened so far: "I wanted him to be tall, dark-haired and robust. He isn´t. He is fair-haired, medium-sized and thin. I felt disappointed, but started weighing the facts. I realized that I myself might not be perfect either and decided to go ahead."

It would be very, very interesting to know what would have happened if women had chosen their mating partners via internet from the very beginning of the existence of the mankind. So far we have chosen our partners in the same way as the peacock hens do. They look at the size, shape and colour of the tail.

The peacock hen knows that the more impressive the tail, the more difficult it is for the cock to stay alive. The big tail makes looking for food complicated. A colourful tail looks also delicious on the menú of the fox, tiger and other big cats. From the point of view of peacock´s survival the big tail means a serious handicap. The peacock hen does not think short-sightedly of her own benefit. If it did, she would choose a cock with the least striking tail. That would ensure that she won´t become an instant widow. Now she chooses the cock that has the biggest and most colourful tail just because it is so difficult and dangerous to carry. The choice is based on the simple message sent by the cock: "I´m so strong and peacockwise intelligent that I can afford a handicap like this. It is difficult to carry and impossible to hide, but it is exactly therefore I´m worth choosing. I´m special. My genes have extra value."

To be attractive in the eyes of the opposite sex you need to do something difficult. You need to send messages showing that you have extra capacities - a good sense of humour, artistic talent, a relaxed attitude towards life and its hazzles. No matter what it is, it has to tell that you need not use your last bits and pieces of energy just for the simple day-to-day survival. You have excessive vitality. You can afford to waste it.

Tor Norretranders´ book Homo generosus - seksiä, taidetta ja bisnestä (ISBN: 951-884-383-X, Danish original Det generose menneske: En naturhistorie om at umage giver mage) is an eye-opener. Norretranders uses the term kallis signaali, an expensive signal, for the peacock´s tail. According to his theory life is not simply survival of the fittest. Natural selection did not make us as we are. The present animal life is result of all the choices females have made. Decisive is not what is done, decisive is that a female registers it to be difficult in the same way as carrying a beautifully developed peacock´s tail is.

Norretranders compares the human brain with the peacock´s tail. The brain is first of all a sexual attraction, a profuse show of efficiency, a gigantic waste of resources. We have brain just to show to the opposite sex that we are worth getting to know and having as a mate. In the case of human beings both men and women make choices. Both of us use the brain to send expensive signals telling the opposite sex that we have excessive resources, we can afford this and that.

What does this have to do with my friend and the man she has met via internet? When she was young, she got married with a man that was tall, dark-haired and robust, she had three handsome boys and a beautiful girl with him, and not too soon the man realised that the marriage did not suit him, he left and she was left to take care of the children. Now that the children are grown up, she has studied and got a university degree. She is a highly appreciated professional in her field. And without internet she would make the same choice she did when young - tall, dark-haired and robust. However, now she learnt to know a different kind of expensive signal first - a proof of the existence of profuse energy and the gigantic waste of resources...

If most people, or all people in the world had made their mating choices based on that specific expensive signal, what would humans look like, how would we act today, what type of problems would we have, what kind of suggestions for their solution?

What will normal life in Finland look like in twenty, forty years´ time if most of the young people first learn to love the brain power and just after that the looks of the other person? Or maybe that does not matter. All people are beautiful when young. Maybe the internet is just for the second choices.

What Type of 10-People-Daily Presence?

2007-07-22T04:10:00.000-07:00

"Am I the first person you talk to today?" Pei asks. I have just settles down on the sofa with a Sunday newspaper in my hand. He calls me from Belfast. We had lost contact since he moved over to Gothenburg to write his doctoral thesis there.

It is strange and exhilarating to think that, in principle, all the lost friends can now be found by Internet. One day, sitting by my computer it occured to me to google his name. Pei´s brain power is geared towards developing information technology. It would be very strange indeed if he had no presence in the Internet. We found each other again. Before hanging up he says laughingly: "Now you still have nine people to meet today."

It was a good start for some aquajogging. As you can see it makes you feel relaxed, flexible and elastic. My Hungarian friends said that they are having 40 degrees centigrade and the water in their head is boiling. Here you need to run to make the water warm no matter if it is in your head or in the lakes.

I have had some setbacks in my effort to meet at least ten people a day. Or maybe not real setbacks, just some slipshod definitions of whom to include into that number. Comissario Brunetti and his wife Paola from Venice easily bring ten people into my life on a daily basis. And we communicate in Spanish which, of course, is both useful and enjoyable.

Lately I have enjoyed similar kind of paper-and-ink transmitted meetings with some other people as well. What do you think of the value of my meeting with a person who describes his childhood like this:

"One of my profound memories of my early childhood was seeing him (=father) sitting in the kitchen next to the wood-burning stove, drinking a bottle of whiskey, and proceeding to pull out some of his teeth, both good and bad, with his electrician´s pliers. He needed dentures but thought that the local dentist was asking too much money for the part of the job he could just as easily do himself."

While reading that I immediately remembered my father and my mind started searching for all heroic things he did when I was small. I never saw him pulling out his teeth. Drinking whiskey does not count either. He did that more or less secretly, as it used to have unwanted consequences, mainly my mother´s sadness and disapproval. Somehow my father´s heroism cannot be described as an instant picture. It´s all too complicated for that. Before I was born he had been a nineteen-year-old fighting on three different active fronts - Uhtua-Kiestinki, Tali-Ihantala and Tornio - fearing for his own life, killing people and nearly losing his own life, always conscious that it has to be taken good care of. My father was a machine gun shooter.

A machine gun was heavy to carry in many ways. You had to carry thirty kilos yourself. "Once I threw it away." he once confessed. But it was not only a question of kilos. The Soviet officers on the other side of the front just sent their men to be killed. "There were more and more of them coming to be shot." It must have been very difficult to think of yourself as a great war-hero then.

Later on it became even more difficult. - Maybe you know the film Bridge on the River Kwai. It came out in 1957. In a couple of year´s time it was to be seen in Lapland as well. My father went to see it. He had to come out. "I couldn´t watch those men suffering like that." he told my mother. He knew too much to be able to go through that artificial suffering. Once I remember my father having gone for hare hunt with his new dog. Coming back home he said that he could not fire the gun. It felt too bad.

While writing this I realize that once more my text is becoming a desciption of normal life in Finland. I have noticed that when the post-war generation people come together and if there are no representatives of the younger generations present, we start asking: "What did your father do during the war? Where was he?" We go through all we know about the incidents then, their consequences for our early childhood as well as for the old age of our parents. We are looking for heroes. Maybe we also feel a bit ashamed. Our understanding has come so late and their war experiences were so near. Have you ever thought about the mental distance of the year 2000? It was a war in their own country. It lasted for several years. It was even closer than the year 2000.

I return to the father in the text pulling out his own teeth. How many people have I met when reading that text by Yvon Chouinard? The name of the books is Let my People Go Surfing, The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (ISBN: 0-14-303783-8).

When reading something you do not meet only those people that are mentioned in the text. You start scanning your own life and the interpretations you have about other people´s lives. Sometimes you get focused on yourself. This happened when he told that he was a child who disliked competition. So did I and I still do. Anyhow, Yvon Chouinard has built an organization that makes a difference in the world of business. On 24.6. I wrote:

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

What Chouinard is saying in his book is that to be successful in business you need not necessarily compete with other companies. You need not be a born competitor wanting to beat all others to become successful. You can avoid competition by looking for business opportunities where others have not found them. Blue oceans, you know, but that book on now on somebody else´s table.

I still need to read Chouinard´s book, because I have not yet found out what his metaphor for building business might have been. It probably has something to do with mountain climbing and the heroism embedded in it. Going to a concert is nothing comparable to that. Anyway, going to a concert -metaphor has soemthing important to it from the business point of view: in concerts the performers have practiced, everybody knows what to do, and when to do it, people trust each other and they support one another - everybody is doing their best. You as a listener have the full right to enjoy what is going on. Everything is based on mutually accepted agreements. All parts feel satisfied and happy.

I need to go on reading Chouinard´s book. A while ago neighbour´s girls and their dog Ansa dropped in. Vilma comes to play the piano whenever she feels like that. Ansa was looking for Uffe. - After this surprise visit I still need to meet six people to make the total of ten meetings for today.

Washing Windows in Venice

2007-07-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

As human beings we have a special and a very admirable talent. We are on-line learners. You can´t switch off your learning mechanisms. The most amazing feature in our capacity to learn is that we can learn from other people´s experiences as well. You need not drink or drug your body and mind kaput yourself. It is enough to see what has happened to those who never stopped testing their limits as regards to drinks and drugs. You need not even see something to learn it. You may read about it - and in any language you happen to know.

Last time I wrote about bad-smelling last messages. Reading Amigos en las altas esferas by Donna Leon I got an opportunity to learn to describe that particular event and smell in Spanish (ISBN:84-322-1708-5) I do not have any idea whether you want to share that learning experience with me or not, but the Donna Leon´s description might be worth looking at:

"En el primer rellano, le salió al encuentro el olor. Viscoso, denso, penetrante, que hablaba de putrefacción, de inmundicia, de una suciedad inhumana. A medida que se acercaba al segundo piso, el olor se acentuaba, y durante un momento terrible Brunetti creyó ver la avalancha de moléculas que se precipitaban sobre él, se adherían a sus ropas y le entraban por nariz y garganta, portadoras del horrible recortadorio de la mortalidad. "

As to the original event I was tellling about - I´m not totally convinced that I would have reacted to the smell had I read the text sometime before walking up the stairs. We seldom percieve things that we do not expect to exist. - Maybe I can turn this text onto some more positive rails if I turn round the previous sentence: We percieve things and phenomena that we expect to exist. Our intentions become our goals and objectives.

I like to go to places by car. Anyhow, I feel bad for the environmental damage cars cause. My friend came to get me somewhere by her car. It is red outside and smells beige-coloured leather inside. It feels like a cat or a lazy panther. And it is gas-fuelled. I learnt that we have five service stations in Finland that sell gas for cars. The total area of the country is about 337 000 km2.

I immediately got worried about my friend having to plan all her trips from one service station to the next and not being able to go to Lapland, for instance. In Lapland there are only 14 people per square kilometre and the distances are long. It would be highly unlikely that they would have a couple of those five service stations there.

Technology does wonders. Until the end of the nineteenth century people thought that engineers were unable to make mistakes. Maybe we should restore that belief. When my friend starts the engine, it uses petrol. Then it changes over to gas automatically. She can drive about 350 kilometres using gas and when there is no more left, the engine starts drinking petrol again. And sitting comfortably in the beige-leather smelling car you know nothing about those changes. I find it amazing. My idea about gas-fuelled cars was something similar to the häkäpönttö cars and lorries they used during the war. They were carrying a kind furnace at the back. Every few kilometres they had to be stopped and somebody had to fill in chop wood into it.

It is easy to guess now what type of car I want to have in the future. I know that cars are not ecologically sound and sustainable, but maybe we could give our engineers opportunities to show that sustainable technologies have been developed and there are alternative solutions. In that sense we have hope. It is just the market economy that wants the process to go on as it now does.

Instead of a car el Comisario Brunetti uses boats - lancha y vaporetto - because he lives in Venice. One more thing that I learnt while reading about him and his work is that the houses in Venice do not fall down. They maybe sink, but they do not fall down.

I am also very grateful for Paola Brunetti´s idea about washing mirriors and windows. She says that you can wash a mirror and when it is washed you immediately see the result. But washing a window you do not see the result of your work before you have closed it. When you close the window the light meets it in a different angle and that different angle often reveals spots that are not yet clean. The only way to evaluate the work done is to change the angle you look at the results.

"/.../ cuando cierras la ventana, la luz vuelve a entrar con el ángulo de antes y entonces ves que aún está sucia por fuera o que te has dejado un trozo en parte de dentro. Entonces tienes que volver a abrirla y limpiar otra vez. Pero no puedes estar seguro de que cristal está bien limpio hasta que cierras la ventana o la miras desde otro ángulo.
- Y el espejo? - preguntó él.
Ella lo miró y sonrió.
- El espejo lo ves por un solo lado. La luz no lo atraviesa. Lo limpias y listo. No hay más que una manera de verlo.

Want to be my dog tonight?

2007-07-18T11:00:00.000-07:00

"Would you like to be my dog?" I call my children´s godfather. If Uffe were alive, he would greatly appreciate this opportunity to go out. A heavy wind is disciplining the trees. The occasional bursts of raindrops are wind-surfing on their leaves. It is nine o´clock and it would be unpleasant to go alone to the lakeside. - Unpleasant or frightening, it depends how honest you want to be. Not having a dog to accompany me I´m becoming very conscious of the geography of fear. I need to activate my creative talents. "May I talk to your dog Ansa?" I ring the neighbour´s doorbell.

Uffe used to check if Ansa had left any of her bones in the garden. A couple of times he found something, picked it up and ran immediately back home. He knew exactly that he was pinching something. Now it is time to pay back. In my house nobody finds pig´s ears as an irresistible temptation any more. I found some left from Christmas. Samuli had packed them into a big box. Obviously there was no need for more presents for Uffe.

Uffe was the only one in our family who felt authentic joy and excitement on Christmas Eve. He picked up his presents one by one, ran out-of-doors to open them, checked quickly what was in the box and ran back to get more. - Maybe we need to re-design our Christmas routines now. Or maybe we need to show our own joy and gratitude more openly.

Ansa had no interest in the pig´s ear box I brought her. She did not attack it to find out if there could be something to eat inside. The box was opened for her. Pig´s ears having paved the way the girls promised to come for a swim with me. What a luck and blessing to have neighbours like them!

We live in small houses surrounded by gardens - casas con jardin. This area was built in the beginning of the fifties. That is why the gardens are big enough for growing apples, gooseberry and currant bushes, potatoes, carrots etc. Few people grow anything anymore. The important thing is that we know each other, and we know approximately what is going in our families. Nobody feels any special curiosity about other people´s life, yet we are approximately informed about the various going-ons in neighbours´ lives. It is normal.

My mother lives in a block of flats, six floors and mostly elderly people. If you walk up the stairs you smell potatoes being cooked and coffee being made. My mother lives upmost and sometimes I walk up the stairs just to test my physical condition.

One day my mother told that someone had been found dead in her flat. I remember that a couple of times, when I walked up the stairs there was a very bad smell in the staircase. I also remember my mother having come into my car carrying with her a very unpleasant smell. It was very strange and I did not want to hurt her mentioning anything about it. I did not recognize the smell, but if I ever meet it again, I will know that it is the smell of a person who has been dead for some time already. The ventilation had carried the smell into my mother´s the wardrope. It had got stuck just with the clothes that she did not normally use and had to take out from the wardrobe.

It is not normal to meet smelling dead bodies in Finnish houses and blocks of flats. The staircases may smell cooking potatoes, making coffee, baking cakes, smoking cigars or anything else. It is absolutely normal. Living alone is normal as well.

As far as I know about forty per cent of Finnish households are one-person-households which again means that living alone and lonely becomes normal, too. And that again means that dying alone at your home is not absolutely unnormal. And if that happens the only message you can send to others is the unbelievably bad smell. Sending the smell-message is inevitable, but anyhow useless, if it is taken as one of the normal smells of a human household - baking cakes, smoking cigars, burning food etc.

When something totally out of normal happens, we miss it. Your last desperate effort to tell others that you are dead may get wasted. Maybe you know the story of American natives who saw the sailing boats approaching their shores in the horizon. They had never seen sailing boats.The concept was totally unknown to them, but they had seen strange clouds and other climatic phenomena. These previous experiences made them think that the sailing boats belonged to the same category of climatic events.

What am I trying to tell you? All meanings are shared. Somebody has first learned something and then told about it to somebody else. That is why this somebody else knows how to interprete the message sent. Even the most desperate smelling message is useless in an environment that has no related experiences. Please, share your experiences! Give away all that you know! Had my mother not mentioned that somebody had been found dead in a flat somewhere below hers I would never have learnt what the message told by that strange smell tried to tell me. Next time I know the message and I can call the police. The unnormal state of affairs will not last as long as it now did.

Salt Pot-Opportunities

2007-07-12T09:29:00.000-07:00

A while ago I wrote that for building a remarkable life you need to meet ten people a day. That is what president Kekkonen did. Since writing that I have learnt two things. One is that you can never meet one person only. The other one is that you never know, who all those you meet are .

Recently I met a lady who has lived for thirty years with her head covered with a scarf - always. Meeting her you simultaneously meet the elderly man who raped her and harmed her when she was a young girl.

When we meet somebody with some kind of peculiarity, we tend to forget that "las cosas ocurren a consequencia de otras cosas". Due to this same principle - things occuring as a consequence of other things - we can also change what may first look final and permanent. This particular lady does not wear the scarf any more. Her hair is growing again. What was hidden in her mind for thirty years has been processed in therapy. That is why her mind does not need the visible sign of missing hair to tell us that she has been badly hurt.

We always leave footprints. Some of them are dirty and heavy, others have a healing effect, some are exciting and inspiring. Last week I visited some new friends. I am very excited about the footprints they set on my mind. Sometimes I think that I tend to meet people to be able to avoid people. I do not pay an unconditional attention to the person who I am talking with. I´m not totally present. Learning to know people who are present and who have an authentic interest in the exchange of ideas that is going on is like to finding a treasure. These two meetings are still having practical consequences: I have been arranging my study, filing papers and throwing useless scrab away. A refreshed mind wants to have refreshed surroundings.

Uffe´s footprints - audible and visible - are still in the house. Yesterday I collected his lead and harness, kept them in my hand to find out what to do with them, and then put them back to where they normally are. We used to go out for an hour´s walk every day. It was normal, no matter what the weather was like. I used to know exactly what was happening in the nature. First in the spring come the blue flowers, after them white, then yellow and then all the green starts growing up; in May and the first weeks of June you can enjoy beautiful concerts in the mornings and evenings. In August only bachelors sing. Others are busying to get their family ready to fly to the south for winter.

Now I need to build new things to make my life normal again. I just realised that we have a very comfortable armchair that we hardly ever use. Uffe wanted to have it for himself. That´s why we had to put a big, blue china ball sitting there. I took the ball away. Sometimes I could just sit down and read in that particular armchair. Just now my occasional mastery of Spanish lets me enjoy detective stories by Donna Leon. Venice is worth visiting every now and then. That armchair is a perfect place for visits like that.

Objects are something that resist our thoughts. Objects are the part of reality that are not directly controllable by our thoughts. Thoughts are under our direct control. We can work and modify them. But if you want to work an object you have to do a series of concrete activities and deeds and they are subjected to certain places and limitations. A salt pot is an object. If you want to use it you have to turn it upside down for a while. - When something unnormal happens in life, the mind may use that as an opportunity to function in the same way the salt pot does.

Uffe - The Secret Agent

2007-07-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

On Monday in the evening the visitors having gone away I went for a walk with Uffe, my dog. When we got to the other side of the street, Uffe felt tired and lied down on the pavement. Waiting for him to get up I called Samuli and asked him to come. Uffe might need help to be able to return back home. Samuli having arrived Uffe collected all his energy and walked home.

He was out of breath. As he was on medication we decided to call a veterinarian. He adviced us to come and meet him. Once more Uffe collected himself and jumped into the car. It was a low jump, but a jump it was. When we came back home with Samuli, we lifted him on the garage floor. In the morning we took him to the crematorium.

Now we live with his presence in his pillows, his dishes, his special way to greet us in the mornings and to sit at the gate watching what is going on in the street. When something is taken away, it anyway has meaning. And the meaning is presence. It is presence in the form of concrete objects, various sights, sounds, doings, ideas, plans. It covers the past, the present and the future. Of course it does not cover everything, but it covers surprisingly much.

Uffe is present when I leave my house to go somewhere. Now I do not tell him if he can come with me or not. I do not say: "Lähdetään. Autoon!" Neither do I explain why dogs cannot come - too hot in the car, dogs not allowed to participate in seminars, have to wait too long etc. Now I do not tell him who comes to take care of him if I go away for a long time. Neither do I close doors to keep him out of kitchen.

When Uffe was young he could go anywhere when alone at home. However, once we came back and realised that the cooker was red hot. There was a pot on the floor in front of it and another one in the corner beside the children´s computer. Obviously he had been cooking. Maybe he had looked for recepies in he internet. Maybe he was just chatting with his friends. - I was extremely happy not having returned half an hour later. Ever since that we always made sure that Uffe kept out of the kitchen when being alone at home.

There are very many things I need to learn to do in a different way now. When coming downstairs in the morning I do not talk to him first, I do not caress him, I do not open the doors. I leave them open before going to bed. I do not remind myself of having to give him the medicine - the regular one wrapped in a slice of cheese, the special one first mashed into powder, then baked into lever paté and after that wrapped in a cheese slice - I do not ask him to come out and get the newspaper from the letter box. Now I need to re-progamme all these small details to build them into new daily routines.

It is interesting how tiring this re-programming is. When you have lived for 13 years with someone that someone has become knit into your daily life on all its levels. He or she has a surprising number of presences everywhere in your life.

Sleeping dogs dream. At least Uffe did. He was running with only his pawns moving and simultaneously barking in a low quiet voice. I do not know how he would have reacted if I had asked him where he had been and what he had been doing while dreaming. I decided not to ask, because as far as I know dogs highly appreciate their own privacy. However, one day I found it out - just by accident.

In February I went for a seminar in Braunschweig in Germany. Luckily we had a couple of hours free time and equally luckily I found a bookshop there. I bought two books by the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith. One was Ein Krokodil für Mma Ramotswe, Der erste Fall der ´No. 1 Ladies´Detective Agency´ and the other one Ein Gentleman für Mma Ramotswe, Der Zweite Fall der ´No. 1 Ladies´Detective Agency´.

You probably know Mma Ramotswe, the proprietress of the Number one Ladies´ Detective Agency in Botswana and the first female detective of the same country. Had I never gone to the Braunschweig seminar, found the bookshop and bought the two books, I would never have found out where Uffe goes and what he does while sleeping here in Tampere, Finland.

It was not until I had returned home that I had a closer look at the books. And what a surprise I had! On the cover of Ein Krokodil für Mma Ramotswe there is an authentic picture of Botswana. It must have been taken by Mma Ramotswe herself, because she is not in the picture. Or maybe she is disguised - she is carrying a big yellow plastic back on her head, another one in her hand, and she is wearing a pink dress and white tennis shoes. The short dress is covered with a white apron. As Mma Ramotswe prefers elegant dressing this must be a disguise.

Anyway, whoever this lady is, she is interviewing a gentleman sitting on a bench in a park. And when you look further back a little bit to the right of the lady, who do you see there? It is Uffe. He has his harness on and his hair has a short, sporty cut which obviously feels comfortable also in the hot Botswanian afternoon. When you look at his big brown eyes, you immediately see that he is not just lazying around. He is paying attention to Mma Ramotswe and her interviewee and listening attentively to their discussion.

All of us know that Uffe was a special case. However, no one of us had the slightest idea about his active contacts and co-operation with Mma Ramotswe and the Number One Ladies´Detective Agency in Botswana. If you want to now more about Uffe´s company in Botswana, you could read, for instance Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith. Or The Kalahari Typing School for Men, Blue Shoes of Happiness... I´m totally convinced that you, too, will feel happy for Uffe having had so interesting friends in Africa.

Flat Screens for Time and Tests

2007-07-08T12:58:00.000-07:00

Do you know what your mind does while you are sleeping? Once mine was for a walk with Mika Häkkinen, hand in hand. However there was a young lady who came and said that she would like to go with Mika. I let my hand free and watched them walking away. I felt very happy for them. That is how things should be, I thought. Haven´t met them ever since. Hope they lived happily ever after.

Sometimes my mind likes to take me back to school. The matriculation examination is approaching. I have passed all exams with flying colours, only the mathematics is left and I haven´t even taken part in the compulsory courses. Now I have to go to the teacher and tell him the terrible truth: No chances, no way. - You can imagine how happy I feel waking up in the middle of my present life that has nothing to do with school or mathematics and where everything looks more or less manageable.

Last night my mind decided to test me. I was asked how the researcher so-and-so defines meaning. I had no idea, because I had not read the book I should have. Anyhow I decided to take the test. My mind has obviously entered the internet age, because the test was given on four parallel screens.

I touched the first screen and saw a series of events on it. "Well there is meaning in that, of course, because everything carries meaning. But this obviously isn´t what that particular researcher means with meaning." Then I touched the second screen. That showed a series of events as well. The difference was that something was taken away from the picture. It was taken away and anyway it now had a meaning. The same occured on the third screen. "All right, I thought. The physical presence of the thing is not needed to give a special meaning. Meaning is something you have once learnt. " My answer was accepted. That particular researcher´s definition for meaning is that you learn them.

It is curious to think how seldom we think of meanings, of how they are given and how we continuously participate in various meaning making processes.

I have a friend who is active in water skiing. Active groups of water skiers in St Petersburg and Tampere have decided to start co-operation. In June they arranged a competition in St Petersburg and during this weekend another one here in Tampere. In addition to Russians and Finns there are participants from Latvia and Lithuania as well. Their goal is to build a competition of international importance.

I find their water skiing activity an exellent example of meaning making. We can choose any idea, in the same way as they have done, and start developing it. Or maybe, it is the other way round, the idea chooses us and we start to work to make it become something more or less concrete. Winnie the Pooh thinks that the originator is the idea: it is not that he would be hungry, they are the honey pots that are sending inviting messages to him. If you want to have a closer look at this discussion, you could read, for instance An Introduction to Social Constructionism by Vivien Burr (ISBN: 0-415-10405-X).

Winnie the Pooh points out an important matter when refering to the inviting honey pots. "/.../det finns tolv honungsburkar i mitt skafferi, och de har ropat på mig i timmar. Jag kunde inte höra dem ordentligt förut, för Kanin bara pratade, men om ingen säger något utom de tolv burkarna, Nasse, så kommer jag att veta, varifrån de ropar." (Hoff, Benjamin: Tao engligt Puh, ISBN: 91-46-15383-7)

Winnie the Pooh´s reasoning brings the ten-people-per-day concept under reconsideration. We need silence to hear the ideas when they are inviting us.

Another modification of ten-people-per-day idea is that talking to a total stranger could count two or three people you know well beforehand. You never know what kind of worlds a total stranger will invite you to.

I met Sergey at the water skiing competition. What he told about his normal life in St Petersburg opened a new world to me. I had no idea about algorithmic training before. Sergey is also an excellent pitcher. He knows how to pitch professionals and for lay people he has a special version of his company´s elevator talk.

I know now that algorithmic training makes it possible to chart the value differences between various stock exchanges at any moment. In a way his company sells time for a good price. Time, especially speed, has become an interesting commodity. "You can show people significant statistics and beautiful diagrams and they drop to sleep. But immediately when you start talking about speed, everybody is fully awake." Sergey said.

It would be very interesting to know how the concept of time will be changed in the becoming years. As regard to speed, does the world become a flat screen instead of being a globe? The Finnish summer night in June has a great potiential of speed. In july it is slowing down as if it took a special time off to smell the strawberries.

Healing Stories

2007-07-07T12:18:00.000-07:00

Power is created when people come together and start doing something together. That has been said by Hannah Arendt. Power is related to people and their common activities.

Our former president Kekkonen had an unsurpassed talent of gaining power. You cannot have power unless you meet people. He is told to have had the rule of meeting at least ten people per day. In the Middle Ages kings could not have permanent residences. They had to travel around their territories all the time to meet the ten people for their own power´s sake.

Since Thursday I have been counting the number of people I meet daily. Not paying attention to the importance of meeting people I could happily stay at home for a couple of weeks and then feel totally suffocated.

Thursday was more a less a good day. I do not even remember what happened then. Friday was a bit problematic. The first meeting in the morning was surrounded by cold water. The hot Finnish summer days were over, at least for the time being, and that makes the water in the lakes pretty cool. Anyway, I found out that aquajogging is my sport. A couple of minutes jogging makes the cold water turn warm. Aquajogging feels absolutely childish and my body seems to like that.

After aquajogging I met my mother to take her to acupuncture. Meetings with your mother do not count - I suppose.

After that I met a friend of mine in the open-air market place. We had sardinas asadas for lunch. Maybe I should say sardinas asadas finlandesas, because coregonus albula has never seen any salt before being spread on a frying pan in the market place. The lunch was delicious.

I missed an afternoon meeting sleeping deep and sound. That meant that I still needed to meet eight people to make it ten per day. Luckily there was one more meeting to go to. When coming back home I wished I had never gone there.

This is what happened: I simply broke the rules of decent group behaviour taking a position of power that I wasn´t entitled for. I got so much involved in wondering why someone had difficulties answering the question: "What have you learnt since we last met?" that I started testing different questions to find out some kind of answer. I was caught up by curiosity. Baruch Spinoza would say that I was caught by a passion, which according to him is always a questionable thing to do.

The others must have found my questioning embarassing. My tunnel vision was focused on that one person only. I simply did not sense the warning signals the others must have been sending to me.

I made a mistake and I got a punishment straight away - somebody started going around with a coffee pot exactly when it was my turn to answer that same question. My immediate interpretation was that she was making a mistake. She was behaving in an unacceptable way. I was blaming her in my mind. Luckily I had no opportunity to tell it to her.

Maybe you have experienced what it feels like to be in a group where everybody thinks that you have done a stupidity and there is an unanimous agreement not to show that to anybody. Anyway, everybody knows what has been going on. I think the name for the feeling you enter is shame. You feel shame for yourself and they feel shame and pity for you.

No one wants to experience feelings of shame. In normal life there is no shame. Neither should there be feelings of pity. Baruch Spinoza says that pity is a kind of sorrow or sadness that we feel when something bad has happened to somebody whom we understand to be alike to us. What has happened to her could have happened to me. We feel sad and that makes us unable to approach the feelings of joy and happiness which are vital energy sources of human life.

Feelings of shame and pity indicate that life is in imbalance, its bits and pieces do not fit together. Your mind is agitated and starts shooting harrasing fire in your body.

I came home and started feeling really terrible weighing and pondering all that had happened. As there was no one else to blame besides myself, I had to find a way out. I had to start analysing: What had I done? What made it stupid? Was there perhaps something not that much stupid in it? What had the other people done? Why? What was bad in that? Was there perhaps something good as well?

This is how we story things. Normal life is normal. It does not breed any questioning. Neither does it produce stories. In the beginning of a story there is always a breakage, a disturbance of a status quo.

It was not until later in the evening that I realised that pouring coffee was not bad behaviour. It was my punishment. In fact, a very delicate way to tell me that I had made a mistake.

If my dog Uffe goes outside the gate he knows that he is doing something wrong. Having come back he goes immediately to the bathroom door and expects to be shut in. That is his punishment. He knows that taking the punishment straightens the situation. A couple of times I have tried not to punish him, but that makes him feel bad. So we have an agreement that the system of punishment and forgiving works automatically if he knowingly does something unacceptable.

There is still one aspect of the probemt situation needing explanation - the role of the person whom I cross-examined to find an answer for the question What have you learnt since we last met? I have no clue why she had difficulties answering the question. However, I found one explanation. Maybe she wanted people to pay a special attention to her. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn´t. Anyway, that happened.

The explanation suits perfectly to MY needs. And now I had enough stories to explain what happened in the situation. My mind found the end result satisfactory. The breakage was healed and the experience filed.

Meeting ten people a day might prove out a bit challenging. The necessary encouragement comes from Spinoza. According to him the lot of a wise person is to nourish and refresh herself with moderate and pleasurable food and drink, pleasing scents, the beauty of green plants, charming jewelry, sports games, theatre and other matters that can be enjoyed without harming other people. Spinoza says "without harming other people". He does not say with ten people. Maybe I had better relax and not worry about numbers.

My source for Spinoza is Pietarinen, Juhani: Ilon filosofia, Yliopistopaino, Helsinki, 1993. In English there certainly are several texts to be found also in the category Spinoza made easy.
Besides sensory enjoyment there are other forms of joy and pleasure Spinoza talks about, but no matter what they are, they, too, need to be storied properly. Stories have both creating and healing power - and they need a breakage in the beginning.

By the way - Seela´s comment on my article Stories to think about is worth reading. It is in Finnish. If you enjoy translating Seela´s text on ants and Buenos Aires, that would be very kind of you!

Suitable Shoes and Eight-Passion Business Talk

2007-06-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

In this country the business advisory systems work well. If you have an idea, they do their best to help you to develop it further. Today we went to business counselling to report the results of a marketing research of a business idea we are developing. The research shows that the market exists. All the rest seems to depend on how to finance the project. Three small businesses together does not make one big and prosperous one. We ended up talking about pitching the idea. In other words, we started thinking how to explain the whole concept in three minutes while standing in an elevator by side of a likely business angel.

"Just in case you see proper size shoes while standing in a lift," our advisor said.

Shoes are important. Not only in the elevators but also in art galleries. As far as I know there is only one Finnish art gallerist who has had remarkable success in international art business as well. All kinds of people pop in into art galleries. "How do you recognize, who are the real, big customers? How do they stand out from ordinary visitors?" the interviewer asked.

"You never know," the gallerist said. "There is nothing especial to indicate big buyers. They do not stand out. You never know. " After some thinking she added: "Well, maybe I could say one thing. That is their shoes."

World is filled with valuable tacit knowledge. Sometimes it is in recognizing shoes. Sometimes somewhere else. However, it exists. That is something you can be sure about.

Pitching is of vital importance when building business, no doubt about that. However, it is equally important to be able to talk about life outside business. If you talk only business, you are dull. Dull people do not attract business angels.

The problem embedded in this is that building business does not leave a lot of free time to live a colourful life filled with versatile interests to talk about. What can we do? There is much enough risk in your business idea. You do not want to extend risks to your social life around it. The remedy has been found. You can talk about hockey. If you do not like hockey, you can choose some other passions:

"Audi cars, Breitling watches, tinnitus/Ménièr´s disease, boxers (the dog breed), adopting children, London, digital photography, and Macintosh. With these eight passions, I can connect to anyone in the world."

Having read that I feel helpless. The most familiar one of those topics would be tinnitus. Talking about that is unpleasant, because I need to first imagine the tinnitus sounding. It is a sharp, annoying whistling at the background of the slight rattle of the keyboard. It is like imagining the bagpiper at the corner of a street without the man wearing a kilt. I do not want to talk about tinnitus. Next alternatives would be London and adopting children, but the tinnitus is now going on. I´m unable to concentrate on collecting ideas around any other topics just now. Maybe later.

Audi cars, Breitling watches, boxers, digital photography and Macintosh! A Spanish poet once said to me: "Tener una conversación contigo es como hablar con un extraterrestre." Maybe I should become one to be able to talk passionately about the topics on that list.

Perhaps I am "a pathetic person with no passions". In that case there is one thing I can do: read voraciously. People who read voraciously can at least talk a little about a lot of things.

If you want to learn more about business and passions you will find the above information in the book Kawasaki, Guy: The Art of the Start, The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything (Portfolio, 2004, ISBN: 1-59184-056-2). I greatly appreciate people who share the valuable tacit knowledge they have gathered as business advisors, art gallerists and writers.

Kawasaki says that he would rather be poor than play golf. I would rather play golf than listen to the tinnitus. Luckily I know the message it is telling to me - Go to bed. It´s past midnight.

Stories to Think About

2007-06-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

One day I went to the library. Seen from the air you know why it is called wood grouse - el urogallo. Entering the building you understand why people consider it their own living room. The muumins live in the gound floor. They have been caught in the middle of their adventures. In daytime they look motionless and innocent, as if nothing were happpening there. But you should see their night time acitivities - wood is chopped, ships are loaded, journeys pepaired. http://inter9.tampere.fi/muumilaakso/

During the daytime the activities take place on the first floor. My favourite acitivity is to check what the librarians have chosen as "special offers" at the head of the long shelves - newly acquired books, seasonal topics and something that they for some reason want to point out. That special day I found Cuentos para pensar by Jorge Bucay.

Picking up a book in Spanish is exciting. Due to my occasional mastery of Spanish I never know beforehand if I understand the text or not. Sueños en el umbral by Fatema Mernissi and Sin destino by Imre Kertész are examples of books that might have gained even extra enjoyability just because I read them in Spanish.

Sometimes reading in Spanish becomes pure meditation. I just read and because I do not understand the text, my brain starts working on something else. It is refreshing.

What surprised me in the Cuentos para pensar by Jorge Bucay is the following extract:

"Voy caminando por un sendero.
Dejo que mis pies me lleven.
Mis ojos se posan en los árboles, en los pájaros, en las piedras.
En en horizonte se recorta la silueta de una ciudad.
Agudizo la mirada para distinguirla bien.
Siento que la ciudad me atrae.
Sin saber cómo, me doy cuenta de que en esta ciudad puedo encontrar todo lo que deseo.
Todas mis metas, mis objetivos y mis logros.
Mis ambiciones y mis sueños están en esa ciudad.
Lo que quiro consequir, lo que necesito, lo que más me gustaría ser, aquello a lo que aspiro, lo que intento, por lo que trabajo, lo que siempre ambicioné, aquello que sería el mayor de mis éxitos.
Me imagino que todo eso está en esa ciudad.
Sin dudar, empiezo caminar hacia ella. /.../"
(Bucay, Jorge: Cuentos para pensar, Del nuevo extremo, Integral, 2006, p. 83, ISBN: 84-7901-868-2)

Imagine that there are two people standing at the spot where Bucay starts describing walking on the path. Both of them listen to the story.

One of them follows it and approaches the town, sin dudar. The other one turns around and starts walking to the opposite direction, towards the forest. Looking for the fullfilment of dreams in a town would never occur to her. If you want to activate your dreams, you do it in the forest, you need to be surrounded by nature.

You can guess who of those two people is a Finn.

Thank you Jorge Bucay. Sin tu texto nunca me hubiese fijado en la profundidad de una diferencia cultural así. Los libros contienen universos, mundos enteros y concretos. También tienen consequencias. Aprendemos.

This experience reminds me of Gregory Bateson - the difference that makes a difference. Today´s paper tells that half of the population of the world lives in cities. What would we Finns gain, if we started at least pretending that life in a city could mean the fulfillment of our personal dreams?

It has been raining heavily for three days now. Thick clouds make the summer nights dark grey. It is a pity!

An Invitation to World Championships

2007-06-25T14:50:00.000-07:00

Today I was invited to take part in World Campionships. The contest takes place on Friday. It´s Monday and I´m getting prepared. Mainly mental training at the keyboard. Special focus on persistence in achieving the goal set. This blog-writing programme devours text, labels it as a Draft and then keeps it to himself! I have real difficulties in understanding why the programme is so complicated! The only way to get this text published is to think that this mental strain is useful for gaining some bigger purposes as well. Maybe this is my only possibility to become a world champion. You know the classical once in a lifetime opportunity...

I wanted to add some physical exercise into my training programme to improve my oxygen intake. However, Uffe turned back home when we got on the other side of the street. Somehow he had got the idea that we would go by car. When realising that he should walk he changed his mind and lead me back home.

It is getting cold now. The morning was warm and beautiful. Knowing that the number of hot, sunny summer days is limited to sixteen, if I remember correctly, I decided to invite my mother for a coffee in the open-air market place. Opposite the café there was a stand of the Finnish Aquajogging Association. Aquajogging World Campionships take place in Ikaalinen 29.-30.6.2007. Further information http://vesijuoksu.fi/english.htm

The necessary equipment cost 30 euros. It is a kind of west you wear to be able to run in the water. I hope to have time to test it before Friday.

The programme reveals a kind of age discrimination. Or what do you think of the age groups - 3x50 metres relay, men, women and mixed teams, age + 150 years; 50 metres and marathon, age groups + 40, +50, +60, +70. As you see - exclusively for adults. Sorry young people! You can go to Doris and hit your heads against one another! - Or you can try to find team members with a suitable age to win world championship in relay.

As far as I know the most important matter in sports is to sleep sound, deep and long. This blog-writing programme devours time by side text. In fact I should be sleeping now. My friend Leena bought the aquajogging west as well. She is a madrugador. We made plans to go to practice in the morning. It´s full daylight from three o´clock on. I can put my mobile phone into voiceless, but if she comes to get me Uffe will start barking. I hear him sleeping already...

Finnish Midsummer and Australian song lines

2007-06-24T12:13:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uffe and the sunset

2007-06-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

I get irritated by the asthmatic, hissing voice of my dog - and I get irritated by my own irritation. It is eleven o´clock. He does not want to go to sleep. He wants to sit outside on the steps looking at the garden and smelling the sunset. It means that he could be sitting there for nearly three hours until the sun starts rising again, because the sunset is immediately followed by the sunrise. There is no darkness in between. Uffe, my dog wants to enjoy normal early-summer life in Finland now.

Daytime is filled with all kinds of scattered and dispersed items - irritating and encouraging. It is the chronological order of the daily anyway items that makes the chaos look an organized, premeditated whole, normal life. Maybe Uffe is collecting his daily experiences and organising them into a coherent, dog-formed whole.

Why do I want to write about normal life in Finland? It is because of my very good friend Tobias. I have regularly read his descriptions of normal life in Finland - vida normal en Finlandia - and I have become more and more interested in what he considers to be normal here. Thank you, Tobias.

For two more weeks Tobias can take pictures from his kitchen window at one o´clock at night with the Näsinneula tower and the sun embracing each other in the horizon. From my own windows I can see just the night-blue-coloured sky having a clear hint of yellow in the north. I used to think that the early summer nights here in Tampere are dark. My reference point was Lapland. Tobias´s reference point is the Mediterranian summernight. All is relative.

Julio was driving me to the airport at Barajas in Madrid. "Why do you go to the llegadas?" I asked. "I´m leaving. We should go to the salidas." "All is relative." Julio said. "The indication is for cars, not for aeroplanes." Had I been driving, how could I have known that in this special occasion llegadas refers to cars and not to aeroplanes? Maybe this is why we need friends - to make sure what llegadas y salidas really refer to.

Tobias writes in one of his native tongues. I envy him. His blog is well written and it can be read anywhere around the world. I`m writing in a foreign language. It takes more effort that I would like to admit, but I do it because of maps.

Once I told Russian teacher students that Finland is a maid. They found it surprising and amusing. Later I saw the Russian maps of the world. Finland was a small formless spot in the left hand corner in them. To see the maid of Finland you need to change the perspective and that changes the relations between items. What is normal becomes different. My own map changed.

I am lucky because I need not get worried about my own ability to tell the difference between the normal and not-normal. My dog Uffe knows the difference. He also pulls me back to normality. If I went downstairs into the kitchen now, made some bush tea and sat at the kitchen table to read something, it would not be normal. Uffe would come and look at me with worried eyes as if saying that I should not disturb him like that. "Take your tea and go upstairs, because that is what you normally do."

When there are visitors in the house, I need to sit where I normally do. Otherwise Uffe comes and politely reminds me where I should be sitting.

Somebody has said that our dreams reveal, what we would do if the body didn´t stop us. Our definitions of what is normal function in the same way. They stop us from seeing what is normal as well, which is a nice contradiction. This is why I need my dog Uffe and my friend Tobias. Uffe shows me what I normally do. Tobias shows me what I could also do.

Lately I have been reading Dreams of Trespass. Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatime Mernissi (Spanish: Sueños en el umbral, Memorias de una niña del harén, Finnish: Unelma Vapaudesta, Lapsuuteni haaremissa).

There is a border between the normal and not-normal. In her book Fatima Mernissi refers to the separation of men and women in the harem. Maybe her words would be valid for the borders of normal and not-normal as well:

.. una frontera cósmica divide el planeta en dos. La frontera señala la línea de poder porque dondequiera que haya una frontera, hay dos clases de criaturas que caminan por la tierra de Alá: de un lado, los poderosos y, de otro, los impotentes.
Pregunté a Mina còmo sabría yo en qué lado estaba. Su respuesta fue rápida, breve y clarísima:
- Si no puedes salir; estás en el lado de los impotentes.