Could Proust Change your Life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

"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?