"It´s a very strange book. Every time when you read it, the amount of text has somehow increased." says my friend when I tell her that I am reading Robert Kiyosaki´s Business School one more time (Finnish translation ISBN: 952-468-097-1) .
What have I learnt now? No matter what you want to achieve, you had better be prepaired for rejection. Especially if you want to achieve something people think to be beyond the borders of normality, you will experience very uncomfortable feelings of rejection. Nobody wants to be rejected. It feels uncomfortable. That is why we limit ourselves, we stop trying to achieve anyhting of great personal importance and little by little we give up our dreams. They start getting smaller and smaller to fit inside the borders of what people in general understand to be normal.
Kiyosaki´s advice for avoiding the death of personal dreams is paradoxical. He says that it is just because being rejected feels so unpleasant that we need to look for rejection - supposing you really want your dream to come true. We should be like dandelions in my Slavonic garden. There are a lot of them. In spring-summer they greet me happily here and there. When summer comes they more or less hide away. Only when I have mowed the lawn, feel very content with myself and look back at the result of my work do I see hundreds of individual leaves of dandelions like small Statues of Liberty waving to me: "Happily alive!"
In Finland we have eight seasons. Spring-summer, kevätkesä, is almost everybody´s favourite. It is the time when days are getting longer and longer. Just now the summer is turning towards autumn-summer, syyskesä. When you look at the apple trees you can see that the apples are getting their individual chracteristics. Some are turning red, others yellowish red and some remain green. When the south of Europe is getting ready for their holidays in August, we are returning from holidays to the normal working life routines. In two weeks´ time children will go back to school. Before that happens we get occasional, but regular showers. The sun is shining, it may be warm and all of a sudden it is as if you were standing in a shower.
Have you ever analysed what happens when an object gets a hold of you, when you start wanting to have that specific object? I find that very interesting. You probably have some kind of idea where that kind of catching objects are located. I know some people who have to avoid places where there are handbags or shoes. If they enter those places a couple of handbags beg to come home with them or a pair of shoes might whisper that they may not feel comfortable when walking, but they look very beautiful in the bookshelf. A friend of mine has a beautiful pair of high-heeled Italian shoes on her tv-set, just to look at.
I need to avoid bookshops and art galleries if I want to be sure that no catching objects will get a hold of me. Avoiding art galleries is easier than walking by a bookshop. It does not matter, because books are for learning, earning and living. The money spent on them is deductable in the Finnish taxation system, provided you need the books for earning your living, as I do.
Works of art send us the same expensive signal as books do. They tell us about the abundancy of energy, excessive strength and overflow of vitality - we are here not just to survive, we are here to remind one another of the richness and affluence of life. Today these messages were to be heard on the market place in the city centre. I can relatively easily avoid entering art galleries and exhibitions, but now I was caught by a surprise.
We are having a special Flower Week in Tampere now. There are special flower arrangements in town as well as special events. My friend Leena wanted to go to the city centre, because several art galleries and individual artists had brought mainly graphic art into the market place in the centre - inspite of the occasional showers.
In principle I am broke just now. However, the special feature of the catching objects is that they do not feel any mercy on you. It does not matter if you are broke or not. They just want to come with you. First we decided with my mother to buy a Christmas present for my son Samuli and paid fifty-fifty for it.
Then there was another unique piece of graphic that insisted on coming into my house. I resisted actively. But do you know what this piece of art did - it started using my friend Leena as a negotiator. It made Leena tell me that Robert Kiyosaki says in his book Business School that there are special moments when you need to give yourself the prize first and then after that do the work. It was exactly at that moment when I decided to follow Kiyosaki´s advice. I bought that specific work of art. - It has come into my house. It is special. It is unique. It tells about the abundancy and overflow of energy and vitality in the way all expensive signals do, but anyway I am reading Kiyosaki´s Business School to find out if he really says that the prize should be taken before the work is done. And if he says so, I want to know how often it can be done.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Expensive Signals in the Internet
A friend of mine has found a new partner via internet. She had published an advertisement and now her life is navigating towards changes. She looks simultaneously content, excited and hesitant. I was curious to hear what has happened so far: "I wanted him to be tall, dark-haired and robust. He isn´t. He is fair-haired, medium-sized and thin. I felt disappointed, but started weighing the facts. I realized that I myself might not be perfect either and decided to go ahead."
It would be very, very interesting to know what would have happened if women had chosen their mating partners via internet from the very beginning of the existence of the mankind. So far we have chosen our partners in the same way as the peacock hens do. They look at the size, shape and colour of the tail.
The peacock hen knows that the more impressive the tail, the more difficult it is for the cock to stay alive. The big tail makes looking for food complicated. A colourful tail looks also delicious on the menú of the fox, tiger and other big cats. From the point of view of peacock´s survival the big tail means a serious handicap. The peacock hen does not think short-sightedly of her own benefit. If it did, she would choose a cock with the least striking tail. That would ensure that she won´t become an instant widow. Now she chooses the cock that has the biggest and most colourful tail just because it is so difficult and dangerous to carry. The choice is based on the simple message sent by the cock: "I´m so strong and peacockwise intelligent that I can afford a handicap like this. It is difficult to carry and impossible to hide, but it is exactly therefore I´m worth choosing. I´m special. My genes have extra value."
To be attractive in the eyes of the opposite sex you need to do something difficult. You need to send messages showing that you have extra capacities - a good sense of humour, artistic talent, a relaxed attitude towards life and its hazzles. No matter what it is, it has to tell that you need not use your last bits and pieces of energy just for the simple day-to-day survival. You have excessive vitality. You can afford to waste it.
Tor Norretranders´ book Homo generosus - seksiä, taidetta ja bisnestä (ISBN: 951-884-383-X, Danish original Det generose menneske: En naturhistorie om at umage giver mage) is an eye-opener. Norretranders uses the term kallis signaali, an expensive signal, for the peacock´s tail. According to his theory life is not simply survival of the fittest. Natural selection did not make us as we are. The present animal life is result of all the choices females have made. Decisive is not what is done, decisive is that a female registers it to be difficult in the same way as carrying a beautifully developed peacock´s tail is.
Norretranders compares the human brain with the peacock´s tail. The brain is first of all a sexual attraction, a profuse show of efficiency, a gigantic waste of resources. We have brain just to show to the opposite sex that we are worth getting to know and having as a mate. In the case of human beings both men and women make choices. Both of us use the brain to send expensive signals telling the opposite sex that we have excessive resources, we can afford this and that.
What does this have to do with my friend and the man she has met via internet? When she was young, she got married with a man that was tall, dark-haired and robust, she had three handsome boys and a beautiful girl with him, and not too soon the man realised that the marriage did not suit him, he left and she was left to take care of the children. Now that the children are grown up, she has studied and got a university degree. She is a highly appreciated professional in her field. And without internet she would make the same choice she did when young - tall, dark-haired and robust. However, now she learnt to know a different kind of expensive signal first - a proof of the existence of profuse energy and the gigantic waste of resources...
If most people, or all people in the world had made their mating choices based on that specific expensive signal, what would humans look like, how would we act today, what type of problems would we have, what kind of suggestions for their solution?
What will normal life in Finland look like in twenty, forty years´ time if most of the young people first learn to love the brain power and just after that the looks of the other person? Or maybe that does not matter. All people are beautiful when young. Maybe the internet is just for the second choices.
It would be very, very interesting to know what would have happened if women had chosen their mating partners via internet from the very beginning of the existence of the mankind. So far we have chosen our partners in the same way as the peacock hens do. They look at the size, shape and colour of the tail.
The peacock hen knows that the more impressive the tail, the more difficult it is for the cock to stay alive. The big tail makes looking for food complicated. A colourful tail looks also delicious on the menú of the fox, tiger and other big cats. From the point of view of peacock´s survival the big tail means a serious handicap. The peacock hen does not think short-sightedly of her own benefit. If it did, she would choose a cock with the least striking tail. That would ensure that she won´t become an instant widow. Now she chooses the cock that has the biggest and most colourful tail just because it is so difficult and dangerous to carry. The choice is based on the simple message sent by the cock: "I´m so strong and peacockwise intelligent that I can afford a handicap like this. It is difficult to carry and impossible to hide, but it is exactly therefore I´m worth choosing. I´m special. My genes have extra value."
To be attractive in the eyes of the opposite sex you need to do something difficult. You need to send messages showing that you have extra capacities - a good sense of humour, artistic talent, a relaxed attitude towards life and its hazzles. No matter what it is, it has to tell that you need not use your last bits and pieces of energy just for the simple day-to-day survival. You have excessive vitality. You can afford to waste it.
Tor Norretranders´ book Homo generosus - seksiä, taidetta ja bisnestä (ISBN: 951-884-383-X, Danish original Det generose menneske: En naturhistorie om at umage giver mage) is an eye-opener. Norretranders uses the term kallis signaali, an expensive signal, for the peacock´s tail. According to his theory life is not simply survival of the fittest. Natural selection did not make us as we are. The present animal life is result of all the choices females have made. Decisive is not what is done, decisive is that a female registers it to be difficult in the same way as carrying a beautifully developed peacock´s tail is.
Norretranders compares the human brain with the peacock´s tail. The brain is first of all a sexual attraction, a profuse show of efficiency, a gigantic waste of resources. We have brain just to show to the opposite sex that we are worth getting to know and having as a mate. In the case of human beings both men and women make choices. Both of us use the brain to send expensive signals telling the opposite sex that we have excessive resources, we can afford this and that.
What does this have to do with my friend and the man she has met via internet? When she was young, she got married with a man that was tall, dark-haired and robust, she had three handsome boys and a beautiful girl with him, and not too soon the man realised that the marriage did not suit him, he left and she was left to take care of the children. Now that the children are grown up, she has studied and got a university degree. She is a highly appreciated professional in her field. And without internet she would make the same choice she did when young - tall, dark-haired and robust. However, now she learnt to know a different kind of expensive signal first - a proof of the existence of profuse energy and the gigantic waste of resources...
If most people, or all people in the world had made their mating choices based on that specific expensive signal, what would humans look like, how would we act today, what type of problems would we have, what kind of suggestions for their solution?
What will normal life in Finland look like in twenty, forty years´ time if most of the young people first learn to love the brain power and just after that the looks of the other person? Or maybe that does not matter. All people are beautiful when young. Maybe the internet is just for the second choices.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
What Type of 10-People-Daily Presence?
"Am I the first person you talk to today?" Pei asks. I have just settles down on the sofa with a Sunday newspaper in my hand. He calls me from Belfast. We had lost contact since he moved over to Gothenburg to write his doctoral thesis there.
It is strange and exhilarating to think that, in principle, all the lost friends can now be found by Internet. One day, sitting by my computer it occured to me to google his name. Pei´s brain power is geared towards developing information technology. It would be very strange indeed if he had no presence in the Internet. We found each other again. Before hanging up he says laughingly: "Now you still have nine people to meet today."
It was a good start for some aquajogging. As you can see it makes you feel relaxed, flexible and elastic. My Hungarian friends said that they are having 40 degrees centigrade and the water in their head is boiling. Here you need to run to make the water warm no matter if it is in your head or in the lakes.
I have had some setbacks in my effort to meet at least ten people a day. Or maybe not real setbacks, just some slipshod definitions of whom to include into that number. Comissario Brunetti and his wife Paola from Venice easily bring ten people into my life on a daily basis. And we communicate in Spanish which, of course, is both useful and enjoyable.
Lately I have enjoyed similar kind of paper-and-ink transmitted meetings with some other people as well. What do you think of the value of my meeting with a person who describes his childhood like this:
"One of my profound memories of my early childhood was seeing him (=father) sitting in the kitchen next to the wood-burning stove, drinking a bottle of whiskey, and proceeding to pull out some of his teeth, both good and bad, with his electrician´s pliers. He needed dentures but thought that the local dentist was asking too much money for the part of the job he could just as easily do himself."
While reading that I immediately remembered my father and my mind started searching for all heroic things he did when I was small. I never saw him pulling out his teeth. Drinking whiskey does not count either. He did that more or less secretly, as it used to have unwanted consequences, mainly my mother´s sadness and disapproval. Somehow my father´s heroism cannot be described as an instant picture. It´s all too complicated for that. Before I was born he had been a nineteen-year-old fighting on three different active fronts - Uhtua-Kiestinki, Tali-Ihantala and Tornio - fearing for his own life, killing people and nearly losing his own life, always conscious that it has to be taken good care of. My father was a machine gun shooter.
A machine gun was heavy to carry in many ways. You had to carry thirty kilos yourself. "Once I threw it away." he once confessed. But it was not only a question of kilos. The Soviet officers on the other side of the front just sent their men to be killed. "There were more and more of them coming to be shot." It must have been very difficult to think of yourself as a great war-hero then.
Later on it became even more difficult. - Maybe you know the film Bridge on the River Kwai. It came out in 1957. In a couple of year´s time it was to be seen in Lapland as well. My father went to see it. He had to come out. "I couldn´t watch those men suffering like that." he told my mother. He knew too much to be able to go through that artificial suffering. Once I remember my father having gone for hare hunt with his new dog. Coming back home he said that he could not fire the gun. It felt too bad.
While writing this I realize that once more my text is becoming a desciption of normal life in Finland. I have noticed that when the post-war generation people come together and if there are no representatives of the younger generations present, we start asking: "What did your father do during the war? Where was he?" We go through all we know about the incidents then, their consequences for our early childhood as well as for the old age of our parents. We are looking for heroes. Maybe we also feel a bit ashamed. Our understanding has come so late and their war experiences were so near. Have you ever thought about the mental distance of the year 2000? It was a war in their own country. It lasted for several years. It was even closer than the year 2000.
I return to the father in the text pulling out his own teeth. How many people have I met when reading that text by Yvon Chouinard? The name of the books is Let my People Go Surfing, The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (ISBN: 0-14-303783-8).
When reading something you do not meet only those people that are mentioned in the text. You start scanning your own life and the interpretations you have about other people´s lives. Sometimes you get focused on yourself. This happened when he told that he was a child who disliked competition. So did I and I still do. Anyhow, Yvon Chouinard has built an organization that makes a difference in the world of business. On 24.6. I wrote:
"Successful men and women regard business and corporate life as a game. Less successful women regard it as an event - going to a concert or a theatre."
What Chouinard is saying in his book is that to be successful in business you need not necessarily compete with other companies. You need not be a born competitor wanting to beat all others to become successful. You can avoid competition by looking for business opportunities where others have not found them. Blue oceans, you know, but that book on now on somebody else´s table.
I still need to read Chouinard´s book, because I have not yet found out what his metaphor for building business might have been. It probably has something to do with mountain climbing and the heroism embedded in it. Going to a concert is nothing comparable to that. Anyway, going to a concert -metaphor has soemthing important to it from the business point of view: in concerts the performers have practiced, everybody knows what to do, and when to do it, people trust each other and they support one another - everybody is doing their best. You as a listener have the full right to enjoy what is going on. Everything is based on mutually accepted agreements. All parts feel satisfied and happy.
I need to go on reading Chouinard´s book. A while ago neighbour´s girls and their dog Ansa dropped in. Vilma comes to play the piano whenever she feels like that. Ansa was looking for Uffe. - After this surprise visit I still need to meet six people to make the total of ten meetings for today.
It is strange and exhilarating to think that, in principle, all the lost friends can now be found by Internet. One day, sitting by my computer it occured to me to google his name. Pei´s brain power is geared towards developing information technology. It would be very strange indeed if he had no presence in the Internet. We found each other again. Before hanging up he says laughingly: "Now you still have nine people to meet today."
It was a good start for some aquajogging. As you can see it makes you feel relaxed, flexible and elastic. My Hungarian friends said that they are having 40 degrees centigrade and the water in their head is boiling. Here you need to run to make the water warm no matter if it is in your head or in the lakes.I have had some setbacks in my effort to meet at least ten people a day. Or maybe not real setbacks, just some slipshod definitions of whom to include into that number. Comissario Brunetti and his wife Paola from Venice easily bring ten people into my life on a daily basis. And we communicate in Spanish which, of course, is both useful and enjoyable.
Lately I have enjoyed similar kind of paper-and-ink transmitted meetings with some other people as well. What do you think of the value of my meeting with a person who describes his childhood like this:
"One of my profound memories of my early childhood was seeing him (=father) sitting in the kitchen next to the wood-burning stove, drinking a bottle of whiskey, and proceeding to pull out some of his teeth, both good and bad, with his electrician´s pliers. He needed dentures but thought that the local dentist was asking too much money for the part of the job he could just as easily do himself."
While reading that I immediately remembered my father and my mind started searching for all heroic things he did when I was small. I never saw him pulling out his teeth. Drinking whiskey does not count either. He did that more or less secretly, as it used to have unwanted consequences, mainly my mother´s sadness and disapproval. Somehow my father´s heroism cannot be described as an instant picture. It´s all too complicated for that. Before I was born he had been a nineteen-year-old fighting on three different active fronts - Uhtua-Kiestinki, Tali-Ihantala and Tornio - fearing for his own life, killing people and nearly losing his own life, always conscious that it has to be taken good care of. My father was a machine gun shooter.
A machine gun was heavy to carry in many ways. You had to carry thirty kilos yourself. "Once I threw it away." he once confessed. But it was not only a question of kilos. The Soviet officers on the other side of the front just sent their men to be killed. "There were more and more of them coming to be shot." It must have been very difficult to think of yourself as a great war-hero then.
Later on it became even more difficult. - Maybe you know the film Bridge on the River Kwai. It came out in 1957. In a couple of year´s time it was to be seen in Lapland as well. My father went to see it. He had to come out. "I couldn´t watch those men suffering like that." he told my mother. He knew too much to be able to go through that artificial suffering. Once I remember my father having gone for hare hunt with his new dog. Coming back home he said that he could not fire the gun. It felt too bad.
While writing this I realize that once more my text is becoming a desciption of normal life in Finland. I have noticed that when the post-war generation people come together and if there are no representatives of the younger generations present, we start asking: "What did your father do during the war? Where was he?" We go through all we know about the incidents then, their consequences for our early childhood as well as for the old age of our parents. We are looking for heroes. Maybe we also feel a bit ashamed. Our understanding has come so late and their war experiences were so near. Have you ever thought about the mental distance of the year 2000? It was a war in their own country. It lasted for several years. It was even closer than the year 2000.
I return to the father in the text pulling out his own teeth. How many people have I met when reading that text by Yvon Chouinard? The name of the books is Let my People Go Surfing, The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (ISBN: 0-14-303783-8).
When reading something you do not meet only those people that are mentioned in the text. You start scanning your own life and the interpretations you have about other people´s lives. Sometimes you get focused on yourself. This happened when he told that he was a child who disliked competition. So did I and I still do. Anyhow, Yvon Chouinard has built an organization that makes a difference in the world of business. On 24.6. I wrote:
"Successful men and women regard business and corporate life as a game. Less successful women regard it as an event - going to a concert or a theatre."
What Chouinard is saying in his book is that to be successful in business you need not necessarily compete with other companies. You need not be a born competitor wanting to beat all others to become successful. You can avoid competition by looking for business opportunities where others have not found them. Blue oceans, you know, but that book on now on somebody else´s table.
I still need to read Chouinard´s book, because I have not yet found out what his metaphor for building business might have been. It probably has something to do with mountain climbing and the heroism embedded in it. Going to a concert is nothing comparable to that. Anyway, going to a concert -metaphor has soemthing important to it from the business point of view: in concerts the performers have practiced, everybody knows what to do, and when to do it, people trust each other and they support one another - everybody is doing their best. You as a listener have the full right to enjoy what is going on. Everything is based on mutually accepted agreements. All parts feel satisfied and happy.
I need to go on reading Chouinard´s book. A while ago neighbour´s girls and their dog Ansa dropped in. Vilma comes to play the piano whenever she feels like that. Ansa was looking for Uffe. - After this surprise visit I still need to meet six people to make the total of ten meetings for today.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Washing Windows in Venice
As human beings we have a special and a very admirable talent. We are on-line learners. You can´t switch off your learning mechanisms. The most amazing feature in our capacity to learn is that we can learn from other people´s experiences as well. You need not drink or drug your body and mind kaput yourself. It is enough to see what has happened to those who never stopped testing their limits as regards to drinks and drugs. You need not even see something to learn it. You may read about it - and in any language you happen to know.
Last time I wrote about bad-smelling last messages. Reading Amigos en las altas esferas by Donna Leon I got an opportunity to learn to describe that particular event and smell in Spanish (ISBN:84-322-1708-5) I do not have any idea whether you want to share that learning experience with me or not, but the Donna Leon´s description might be worth looking at:
"En el primer rellano, le salió al encuentro el olor. Viscoso, denso, penetrante, que hablaba de putrefacción, de inmundicia, de una suciedad inhumana. A medida que se acercaba al segundo piso, el olor se acentuaba, y durante un momento terrible Brunetti creyó ver la avalancha de moléculas que se precipitaban sobre él, se adherían a sus ropas y le entraban por nariz y garganta, portadoras del horrible recortadorio de la mortalidad. "
As to the original event I was tellling about - I´m not totally convinced that I would have reacted to the smell had I read the text sometime before walking up the stairs. We seldom percieve things that we do not expect to exist. - Maybe I can turn this text onto some more positive rails if I turn round the previous sentence: We percieve things and phenomena that we expect to exist. Our intentions become our goals and objectives.
I like to go to places by car. Anyhow, I feel bad for the environmental damage cars cause. My friend came to get me somewhere by her car. It is red outside and smells beige-coloured leather inside. It feels like a cat or a lazy panther. And it is gas-fuelled. I learnt that we have five service stations in Finland that sell gas for cars. The total area of the country is about 337 000 km2.
I immediately got worried about my friend having to plan all her trips from one service station to the next and not being able to go to Lapland, for instance. In Lapland there are only 14 people per square kilometre and the distances are long. It would be highly unlikely that they would have a couple of those five service stations there.
Technology does wonders. Until the end of the nineteenth century people thought that engineers were unable to make mistakes. Maybe we should restore that belief. When my friend starts the engine, it uses petrol. Then it changes over to gas automatically. She can drive about 350 kilometres using gas and when there is no more left, the engine starts drinking petrol again. And sitting comfortably in the beige-leather smelling car you know nothing about those changes. I find it amazing. My idea about gas-fuelled cars was something similar to the häkäpönttö cars and lorries they used during the war. They were carrying a kind furnace at the back. Every few kilometres they had to be stopped and somebody had to fill in chop wood into it.
It is easy to guess now what type of car I want to have in the future. I know that cars are not ecologically sound and sustainable, but maybe we could give our engineers opportunities to show that sustainable technologies have been developed and there are alternative solutions. In that sense we have hope. It is just the market economy that wants the process to go on as it now does.
Instead of a car el Comisario Brunetti uses boats - lancha y vaporetto - because he lives in Venice. One more thing that I learnt while reading about him and his work is that the houses in Venice do not fall down. They maybe sink, but they do not fall down.
I am also very grateful for Paola Brunetti´s idea about washing mirriors and windows. She says that you can wash a mirror and when it is washed you immediately see the result. But washing a window you do not see the result of your work before you have closed it. When you close the window the light meets it in a different angle and that different angle often reveals spots that are not yet clean. The only way to evaluate the work done is to change the angle you look at the results.
"/.../ cuando cierras la ventana, la luz vuelve a entrar con el ángulo de antes y entonces ves que aún está sucia por fuera o que te has dejado un trozo en parte de dentro. Entonces tienes que volver a abrirla y limpiar otra vez. Pero no puedes estar seguro de que cristal está bien limpio hasta que cierras la ventana o la miras desde otro ángulo.
- Y el espejo? - preguntó él.
Ella lo miró y sonrió.
- El espejo lo ves por un solo lado. La luz no lo atraviesa. Lo limpias y listo. No hay más que una manera de verlo.
Last time I wrote about bad-smelling last messages. Reading Amigos en las altas esferas by Donna Leon I got an opportunity to learn to describe that particular event and smell in Spanish (ISBN:84-322-1708-5) I do not have any idea whether you want to share that learning experience with me or not, but the Donna Leon´s description might be worth looking at:
"En el primer rellano, le salió al encuentro el olor. Viscoso, denso, penetrante, que hablaba de putrefacción, de inmundicia, de una suciedad inhumana. A medida que se acercaba al segundo piso, el olor se acentuaba, y durante un momento terrible Brunetti creyó ver la avalancha de moléculas que se precipitaban sobre él, se adherían a sus ropas y le entraban por nariz y garganta, portadoras del horrible recortadorio de la mortalidad. "
As to the original event I was tellling about - I´m not totally convinced that I would have reacted to the smell had I read the text sometime before walking up the stairs. We seldom percieve things that we do not expect to exist. - Maybe I can turn this text onto some more positive rails if I turn round the previous sentence: We percieve things and phenomena that we expect to exist. Our intentions become our goals and objectives.
I like to go to places by car. Anyhow, I feel bad for the environmental damage cars cause. My friend came to get me somewhere by her car. It is red outside and smells beige-coloured leather inside. It feels like a cat or a lazy panther. And it is gas-fuelled. I learnt that we have five service stations in Finland that sell gas for cars. The total area of the country is about 337 000 km2.
I immediately got worried about my friend having to plan all her trips from one service station to the next and not being able to go to Lapland, for instance. In Lapland there are only 14 people per square kilometre and the distances are long. It would be highly unlikely that they would have a couple of those five service stations there.
Technology does wonders. Until the end of the nineteenth century people thought that engineers were unable to make mistakes. Maybe we should restore that belief. When my friend starts the engine, it uses petrol. Then it changes over to gas automatically. She can drive about 350 kilometres using gas and when there is no more left, the engine starts drinking petrol again. And sitting comfortably in the beige-leather smelling car you know nothing about those changes. I find it amazing. My idea about gas-fuelled cars was something similar to the häkäpönttö cars and lorries they used during the war. They were carrying a kind furnace at the back. Every few kilometres they had to be stopped and somebody had to fill in chop wood into it.
It is easy to guess now what type of car I want to have in the future. I know that cars are not ecologically sound and sustainable, but maybe we could give our engineers opportunities to show that sustainable technologies have been developed and there are alternative solutions. In that sense we have hope. It is just the market economy that wants the process to go on as it now does.
Instead of a car el Comisario Brunetti uses boats - lancha y vaporetto - because he lives in Venice. One more thing that I learnt while reading about him and his work is that the houses in Venice do not fall down. They maybe sink, but they do not fall down.
I am also very grateful for Paola Brunetti´s idea about washing mirriors and windows. She says that you can wash a mirror and when it is washed you immediately see the result. But washing a window you do not see the result of your work before you have closed it. When you close the window the light meets it in a different angle and that different angle often reveals spots that are not yet clean. The only way to evaluate the work done is to change the angle you look at the results.
"/.../ cuando cierras la ventana, la luz vuelve a entrar con el ángulo de antes y entonces ves que aún está sucia por fuera o que te has dejado un trozo en parte de dentro. Entonces tienes que volver a abrirla y limpiar otra vez. Pero no puedes estar seguro de que cristal está bien limpio hasta que cierras la ventana o la miras desde otro ángulo.
- Y el espejo? - preguntó él.
Ella lo miró y sonrió.
- El espejo lo ves por un solo lado. La luz no lo atraviesa. Lo limpias y listo. No hay más que una manera de verlo.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Want to be my dog tonight?
"Would you like to be my dog?" I call my children´s godfather. If Uffe were alive, he would greatly appreciate this opportunity to go out. A heavy wind is disciplining the trees. The occasional bursts of raindrops are wind-surfing on their leaves. It is nine o´clock and it would be unpleasant to go alone to the lakeside. - Unpleasant or frightening, it depends how honest you want to be. Not having a dog to accompany me I´m becoming very conscious of the geography of fear. I need to activate my creative talents. "May I talk to your dog Ansa?" I ring the neighbour´s doorbell.
Uffe used to check if Ansa had left any of her bones in the garden. A couple of times he found something, picked it up and ran immediately back home. He knew exactly that he was pinching something. Now it is time to pay back. In my house nobody finds pig´s ears as an irresistible temptation any more. I found some left from Christmas. Samuli had packed them into a big box. Obviously there was no need for more presents for Uffe.
Uffe was the only one in our family who felt authentic joy and excitement on Christmas Eve. He picked up his presents one by one, ran out-of-doors to open them, checked quickly what was in the box and ran back to get more. - Maybe we need to re-design our Christmas routines now. Or maybe we need to show our own joy and gratitude more openly.
Ansa had no interest in the pig´s ear box I brought her. She did not attack it to find out if there could be something to eat inside. The box was opened for her. Pig´s ears having paved the way the girls promised to come for a swim with me. What a luck and blessing to have neighbours like them!
We live in small houses surrounded by gardens - casas con jardin. This area was built in the beginning of the fifties. That is why the gardens are big enough for growing apples, gooseberry and currant bushes, potatoes, carrots etc. Few people grow anything anymore. The important thing is that we know each other, and we know approximately what is going in our families. Nobody feels any special curiosity about other people´s life, yet we are approximately informed about the various going-ons in neighbours´ lives. It is normal.
My mother lives in a block of flats, six floors and mostly elderly people. If you walk up the stairs you smell potatoes being cooked and coffee being made. My mother lives upmost and sometimes I walk up the stairs just to test my physical condition.
One day my mother told that someone had been found dead in her flat. I remember that a couple of times, when I walked up the stairs there was a very bad smell in the staircase. I also remember my mother having come into my car carrying with her a very unpleasant smell. It was very strange and I did not want to hurt her mentioning anything about it. I did not recognize the smell, but if I ever meet it again, I will know that it is the smell of a person who has been dead for some time already. The ventilation had carried the smell into my mother´s the wardrope. It had got stuck just with the clothes that she did not normally use and had to take out from the wardrobe.
It is not normal to meet smelling dead bodies in Finnish houses and blocks of flats. The staircases may smell cooking potatoes, making coffee, baking cakes, smoking cigars or anything else. It is absolutely normal. Living alone is normal as well.
As far as I know about forty per cent of Finnish households are one-person-households which again means that living alone and lonely becomes normal, too. And that again means that dying alone at your home is not absolutely unnormal. And if that happens the only message you can send to others is the unbelievably bad smell. Sending the smell-message is inevitable, but anyhow useless, if it is taken as one of the normal smells of a human household - baking cakes, smoking cigars, burning food etc.
When something totally out of normal happens, we miss it. Your last desperate effort to tell others that you are dead may get wasted. Maybe you know the story of American natives who saw the sailing boats approaching their shores in the horizon. They had never seen sailing boats.The concept was totally unknown to them, but they had seen strange clouds and other climatic phenomena. These previous experiences made them think that the sailing boats belonged to the same category of climatic events.
What am I trying to tell you? All meanings are shared. Somebody has first learned something and then told about it to somebody else. That is why this somebody else knows how to interprete the message sent. Even the most desperate smelling message is useless in an environment that has no related experiences. Please, share your experiences! Give away all that you know! Had my mother not mentioned that somebody had been found dead in a flat somewhere below hers I would never have learnt what the message told by that strange smell tried to tell me. Next time I know the message and I can call the police. The unnormal state of affairs will not last as long as it now did.
Uffe used to check if Ansa had left any of her bones in the garden. A couple of times he found something, picked it up and ran immediately back home. He knew exactly that he was pinching something. Now it is time to pay back. In my house nobody finds pig´s ears as an irresistible temptation any more. I found some left from Christmas. Samuli had packed them into a big box. Obviously there was no need for more presents for Uffe.
Uffe was the only one in our family who felt authentic joy and excitement on Christmas Eve. He picked up his presents one by one, ran out-of-doors to open them, checked quickly what was in the box and ran back to get more. - Maybe we need to re-design our Christmas routines now. Or maybe we need to show our own joy and gratitude more openly.
Ansa had no interest in the pig´s ear box I brought her. She did not attack it to find out if there could be something to eat inside. The box was opened for her. Pig´s ears having paved the way the girls promised to come for a swim with me. What a luck and blessing to have neighbours like them!
We live in small houses surrounded by gardens - casas con jardin. This area was built in the beginning of the fifties. That is why the gardens are big enough for growing apples, gooseberry and currant bushes, potatoes, carrots etc. Few people grow anything anymore. The important thing is that we know each other, and we know approximately what is going in our families. Nobody feels any special curiosity about other people´s life, yet we are approximately informed about the various going-ons in neighbours´ lives. It is normal.
My mother lives in a block of flats, six floors and mostly elderly people. If you walk up the stairs you smell potatoes being cooked and coffee being made. My mother lives upmost and sometimes I walk up the stairs just to test my physical condition.
One day my mother told that someone had been found dead in her flat. I remember that a couple of times, when I walked up the stairs there was a very bad smell in the staircase. I also remember my mother having come into my car carrying with her a very unpleasant smell. It was very strange and I did not want to hurt her mentioning anything about it. I did not recognize the smell, but if I ever meet it again, I will know that it is the smell of a person who has been dead for some time already. The ventilation had carried the smell into my mother´s the wardrope. It had got stuck just with the clothes that she did not normally use and had to take out from the wardrobe.
It is not normal to meet smelling dead bodies in Finnish houses and blocks of flats. The staircases may smell cooking potatoes, making coffee, baking cakes, smoking cigars or anything else. It is absolutely normal. Living alone is normal as well.
As far as I know about forty per cent of Finnish households are one-person-households which again means that living alone and lonely becomes normal, too. And that again means that dying alone at your home is not absolutely unnormal. And if that happens the only message you can send to others is the unbelievably bad smell. Sending the smell-message is inevitable, but anyhow useless, if it is taken as one of the normal smells of a human household - baking cakes, smoking cigars, burning food etc.
When something totally out of normal happens, we miss it. Your last desperate effort to tell others that you are dead may get wasted. Maybe you know the story of American natives who saw the sailing boats approaching their shores in the horizon. They had never seen sailing boats.The concept was totally unknown to them, but they had seen strange clouds and other climatic phenomena. These previous experiences made them think that the sailing boats belonged to the same category of climatic events.
What am I trying to tell you? All meanings are shared. Somebody has first learned something and then told about it to somebody else. That is why this somebody else knows how to interprete the message sent. Even the most desperate smelling message is useless in an environment that has no related experiences. Please, share your experiences! Give away all that you know! Had my mother not mentioned that somebody had been found dead in a flat somewhere below hers I would never have learnt what the message told by that strange smell tried to tell me. Next time I know the message and I can call the police. The unnormal state of affairs will not last as long as it now did.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Salt Pot-Opportunities
A while ago I wrote that for building a remarkable life you need to meet ten people a day. That is what president Kekkonen did. Since writing that I have learnt two things. One is that you can never meet one person only. The other one is that you never know, who all those you meet are .
Recently I met a lady who has lived for thirty years with her head covered with a scarf - always. Meeting her you simultaneously meet the elderly man who raped her and harmed her when she was a young girl.
When we meet somebody with some kind of peculiarity, we tend to forget that "las cosas ocurren a consequencia de otras cosas". Due to this same principle - things occuring as a consequence of other things - we can also change what may first look final and permanent. This particular lady does not wear the scarf any more. Her hair is growing again. What was hidden in her mind for thirty years has been processed in therapy. That is why her mind does not need the visible sign of missing hair to tell us that she has been badly hurt.
We always leave footprints. Some of them are dirty and heavy, others have a healing effect, some are exciting and inspiring. Last week I visited some new friends. I am very excited about the footprints they set on my mind. Sometimes I think that I tend to meet people to be able to avoid people. I do not pay an unconditional attention to the person who I am talking with. I´m not totally present. Learning to know people who are present and who have an authentic interest in the exchange of ideas that is going on is like to finding a treasure. These two meetings are still having practical consequences: I have been arranging my study, filing papers and throwing useless scrab away. A refreshed mind wants to have refreshed surroundings.
Uffe´s footprints - audible and visible - are still in the house. Yesterday I collected his lead and harness, kept them in my hand to find out what to do with them, and then put them back to where they normally are. We used to go out for an hour´s walk every day. It was normal, no matter what the weather was like. I used to know exactly what was happening in the nature. First in the spring come the blue flowers, after them white, then yellow and then all the green starts growing up; in May and the first weeks of June you can enjoy beautiful concerts in the mornings and evenings. In August only bachelors sing. Others are busying to get their family ready to fly to the south for winter.
Now I need to build new things to make my life normal again. I just realised that we have a very comfortable armchair that we hardly ever use. Uffe wanted to have it for himself. That´s why we had to put a big, blue china ball sitting there. I took the ball away. Sometimes I could just sit down and read in that particular armchair. Just now my occasional mastery of Spanish lets me enjoy detective stories by Donna Leon. Venice is worth visiting every now and then. That armchair is a perfect place for visits like that.
Objects are something that resist our thoughts. Objects are the part of reality that are not directly controllable by our thoughts. Thoughts are under our direct control. We can work and modify them. But if you want to work an object you have to do a series of concrete activities and deeds and they are subjected to certain places and limitations. A salt pot is an object. If you want to use it you have to turn it upside down for a while. - When something unnormal happens in life, the mind may use that as an opportunity to function in the same way the salt pot does.
Recently I met a lady who has lived for thirty years with her head covered with a scarf - always. Meeting her you simultaneously meet the elderly man who raped her and harmed her when she was a young girl.
When we meet somebody with some kind of peculiarity, we tend to forget that "las cosas ocurren a consequencia de otras cosas". Due to this same principle - things occuring as a consequence of other things - we can also change what may first look final and permanent. This particular lady does not wear the scarf any more. Her hair is growing again. What was hidden in her mind for thirty years has been processed in therapy. That is why her mind does not need the visible sign of missing hair to tell us that she has been badly hurt.
We always leave footprints. Some of them are dirty and heavy, others have a healing effect, some are exciting and inspiring. Last week I visited some new friends. I am very excited about the footprints they set on my mind. Sometimes I think that I tend to meet people to be able to avoid people. I do not pay an unconditional attention to the person who I am talking with. I´m not totally present. Learning to know people who are present and who have an authentic interest in the exchange of ideas that is going on is like to finding a treasure. These two meetings are still having practical consequences: I have been arranging my study, filing papers and throwing useless scrab away. A refreshed mind wants to have refreshed surroundings.
Uffe´s footprints - audible and visible - are still in the house. Yesterday I collected his lead and harness, kept them in my hand to find out what to do with them, and then put them back to where they normally are. We used to go out for an hour´s walk every day. It was normal, no matter what the weather was like. I used to know exactly what was happening in the nature. First in the spring come the blue flowers, after them white, then yellow and then all the green starts growing up; in May and the first weeks of June you can enjoy beautiful concerts in the mornings and evenings. In August only bachelors sing. Others are busying to get their family ready to fly to the south for winter.
Now I need to build new things to make my life normal again. I just realised that we have a very comfortable armchair that we hardly ever use. Uffe wanted to have it for himself. That´s why we had to put a big, blue china ball sitting there. I took the ball away. Sometimes I could just sit down and read in that particular armchair. Just now my occasional mastery of Spanish lets me enjoy detective stories by Donna Leon. Venice is worth visiting every now and then. That armchair is a perfect place for visits like that.
Objects are something that resist our thoughts. Objects are the part of reality that are not directly controllable by our thoughts. Thoughts are under our direct control. We can work and modify them. But if you want to work an object you have to do a series of concrete activities and deeds and they are subjected to certain places and limitations. A salt pot is an object. If you want to use it you have to turn it upside down for a while. - When something unnormal happens in life, the mind may use that as an opportunity to function in the same way the salt pot does.
Uffe - The Secret Agent
On Monday in the evening the visitors having gone away I went for a walk with Uffe, my dog. When we got to the other side of the street, Uffe felt tired and lied down on the pavement. Waiting for him to get up I called Samuli and asked him to come. Uffe might need help to be able to return back home. Samuli having arrived Uffe collected all his energy and walked home.
He was out of breath. As he was on medication we decided to call a veterinarian. He adviced us to come and meet him. Once more Uffe collected himself and jumped into the car. It was a low jump, but a jump it was. When we came back home with Samuli, we lifted him on the garage floor. In the morning we took him to the crematorium.
Now we live with his presence in his pillows, his dishes, his special way to greet us in the mornings and to sit at the gate watching what is going on in the street. When something is taken away, it anyway has meaning. And the meaning is presence. It is presence in the form of concrete objects, various sights, sounds, doings, ideas, plans. It covers the past, the present and the future. Of course it does not cover everything, but it covers surprisingly much.
Uffe is present when I leave my house to go somewhere. Now I do not tell him if he can come with me or not. I do not say: "Lähdetään. Autoon!" Neither do I explain why dogs cannot come - too hot in the car, dogs not allowed to participate in seminars, have to wait too long etc. Now I do not tell him who comes to take care of him if I go away for a long time. Neither do I close doors to keep him out of kitchen.
When Uffe was young he could go anywhere when alone at home. However, once we came back and realised that the cooker was red hot. There was a pot on the floor in front of it and another one in the corner beside the children´s computer. Obviously he had been cooking. Maybe he had looked for recepies in he internet. Maybe he was just chatting with his friends. - I was extremely happy not having returned half an hour later. Ever since that we always made sure that Uffe kept out of the kitchen when being alone at home.
There are very many things I need to learn to do in a different way now. When coming downstairs in the morning I do not talk to him first, I do not caress him, I do not open the doors. I leave them open before going to bed. I do not remind myself of having to give him the medicine - the regular one wrapped in a slice of cheese, the special one first mashed into powder, then baked into lever paté and after that wrapped in a cheese slice - I do not ask him to come out and get the newspaper from the letter box. Now I need to re-progamme all these small details to build them into new daily routines.
It is interesting how tiring this re-programming is. When you have lived for 13 years with someone that someone has become knit into your daily life on all its levels. He or she has a surprising number of presences everywhere in your life.
Sleeping dogs dream. At least Uffe did. He was running with only his pawns moving and simultaneously barking in a low quiet voice. I do not know how he would have reacted if I had asked him where he had been and what he had been doing while dreaming. I decided not to ask, because as far as I know dogs highly appreciate their own privacy. However, one day I found it out - just by accident.
In February I went for a seminar in Braunschweig in Germany. Luckily we had a couple of hours free time and equally luckily I found a bookshop there. I bought two books by the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith. One was Ein Krokodil für Mma Ramotswe, Der erste Fall der ´No. 1 Ladies´Detective Agency´ and the other one Ein Gentleman für Mma Ramotswe, Der Zweite Fall der ´No. 1 Ladies´Detective Agency´.
You probably know Mma Ramotswe, the proprietress of the Number one Ladies´ Detective Agency in Botswana and the first female detective of the same country. Had I never gone to the Braunschweig seminar, found the bookshop and bought the two books, I would never have found out where Uffe goes and what he does while sleeping here in Tampere, Finland.
It was not until I had returned home that I had a closer look at the books. And what a surprise I had! On the cover of Ein Krokodil für Mma Ramotswe there is an authentic picture of Botswana. It must have been taken by Mma Ramotswe herself, because she is not in the picture. Or maybe she is disguised - she is carrying a big yellow plastic back on her head, another one in her hand, and she is wearing a pink dress and white tennis shoes. The short dress is covered with a white apron. As Mma Ramotswe prefers elegant dressing this must be a disguise.
Anyway, whoever this lady is, she is interviewing a gentleman sitting on a bench in a park. And when you look further back a little bit to the right of the lady, who do you see there? It is Uffe. He has his harness on and his hair has a short, sporty cut which obviously feels comfortable also in the hot Botswanian afternoon. When you look at his big brown eyes, you immediately see that he is not just lazying around. He is paying attention to Mma Ramotswe and her interviewee and listening attentively to their discussion.
All of us know that Uffe was a special case. However, no one of us had the slightest idea about his active contacts and co-operation with Mma Ramotswe and the Number One Ladies´Detective Agency in Botswana. If you want to now more about Uffe´s company in Botswana, you could read, for instance Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith. Or The Kalahari Typing School for Men, Blue Shoes of Happiness... I´m totally convinced that you, too, will feel happy for Uffe having had so interesting friends in Africa.
He was out of breath. As he was on medication we decided to call a veterinarian. He adviced us to come and meet him. Once more Uffe collected himself and jumped into the car. It was a low jump, but a jump it was. When we came back home with Samuli, we lifted him on the garage floor. In the morning we took him to the crematorium.
Now we live with his presence in his pillows, his dishes, his special way to greet us in the mornings and to sit at the gate watching what is going on in the street. When something is taken away, it anyway has meaning. And the meaning is presence. It is presence in the form of concrete objects, various sights, sounds, doings, ideas, plans. It covers the past, the present and the future. Of course it does not cover everything, but it covers surprisingly much.
Uffe is present when I leave my house to go somewhere. Now I do not tell him if he can come with me or not. I do not say: "Lähdetään. Autoon!" Neither do I explain why dogs cannot come - too hot in the car, dogs not allowed to participate in seminars, have to wait too long etc. Now I do not tell him who comes to take care of him if I go away for a long time. Neither do I close doors to keep him out of kitchen.
When Uffe was young he could go anywhere when alone at home. However, once we came back and realised that the cooker was red hot. There was a pot on the floor in front of it and another one in the corner beside the children´s computer. Obviously he had been cooking. Maybe he had looked for recepies in he internet. Maybe he was just chatting with his friends. - I was extremely happy not having returned half an hour later. Ever since that we always made sure that Uffe kept out of the kitchen when being alone at home.
There are very many things I need to learn to do in a different way now. When coming downstairs in the morning I do not talk to him first, I do not caress him, I do not open the doors. I leave them open before going to bed. I do not remind myself of having to give him the medicine - the regular one wrapped in a slice of cheese, the special one first mashed into powder, then baked into lever paté and after that wrapped in a cheese slice - I do not ask him to come out and get the newspaper from the letter box. Now I need to re-progamme all these small details to build them into new daily routines.
It is interesting how tiring this re-programming is. When you have lived for 13 years with someone that someone has become knit into your daily life on all its levels. He or she has a surprising number of presences everywhere in your life.
Sleeping dogs dream. At least Uffe did. He was running with only his pawns moving and simultaneously barking in a low quiet voice. I do not know how he would have reacted if I had asked him where he had been and what he had been doing while dreaming. I decided not to ask, because as far as I know dogs highly appreciate their own privacy. However, one day I found it out - just by accident.
In February I went for a seminar in Braunschweig in Germany. Luckily we had a couple of hours free time and equally luckily I found a bookshop there. I bought two books by the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith. One was Ein Krokodil für Mma Ramotswe, Der erste Fall der ´No. 1 Ladies´Detective Agency´ and the other one Ein Gentleman für Mma Ramotswe, Der Zweite Fall der ´No. 1 Ladies´Detective Agency´.
You probably know Mma Ramotswe, the proprietress of the Number one Ladies´ Detective Agency in Botswana and the first female detective of the same country. Had I never gone to the Braunschweig seminar, found the bookshop and bought the two books, I would never have found out where Uffe goes and what he does while sleeping here in Tampere, Finland.
It was not until I had returned home that I had a closer look at the books. And what a surprise I had! On the cover of Ein Krokodil für Mma Ramotswe there is an authentic picture of Botswana. It must have been taken by Mma Ramotswe herself, because she is not in the picture. Or maybe she is disguised - she is carrying a big yellow plastic back on her head, another one in her hand, and she is wearing a pink dress and white tennis shoes. The short dress is covered with a white apron. As Mma Ramotswe prefers elegant dressing this must be a disguise.
Anyway, whoever this lady is, she is interviewing a gentleman sitting on a bench in a park. And when you look further back a little bit to the right of the lady, who do you see there? It is Uffe. He has his harness on and his hair has a short, sporty cut which obviously feels comfortable also in the hot Botswanian afternoon. When you look at his big brown eyes, you immediately see that he is not just lazying around. He is paying attention to Mma Ramotswe and her interviewee and listening attentively to their discussion.
All of us know that Uffe was a special case. However, no one of us had the slightest idea about his active contacts and co-operation with Mma Ramotswe and the Number One Ladies´Detective Agency in Botswana. If you want to now more about Uffe´s company in Botswana, you could read, for instance Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith. Or The Kalahari Typing School for Men, Blue Shoes of Happiness... I´m totally convinced that you, too, will feel happy for Uffe having had so interesting friends in Africa.
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Flat Screens for Time and Tests
Do you know what your mind does while you are sleeping? Once mine was for a walk with Mika Häkkinen, hand in hand. However there was a young lady who came and said that she would like to go with Mika. I let my hand free and watched them walking away. I felt very happy for them. That is how things should be, I thought. Haven´t met them ever since. Hope they lived happily ever after.
Sometimes my mind likes to take me back to school. The matriculation examination is approaching. I have passed all exams with flying colours, only the mathematics is left and I haven´t even taken part in the compulsory courses. Now I have to go to the teacher and tell him the terrible truth: No chances, no way. - You can imagine how happy I feel waking up in the middle of my present life that has nothing to do with school or mathematics and where everything looks more or less manageable.
Last night my mind decided to test me. I was asked how the researcher so-and-so defines meaning. I had no idea, because I had not read the book I should have. Anyhow I decided to take the test. My mind has obviously entered the internet age, because the test was given on four parallel screens.
I touched the first screen and saw a series of events on it. "Well there is meaning in that, of course, because everything carries meaning. But this obviously isn´t what that particular researcher means with meaning." Then I touched the second screen. That showed a series of events as well. The difference was that something was taken away from the picture. It was taken away and anyway it now had a meaning. The same occured on the third screen. "All right, I thought. The physical presence of the thing is not needed to give a special meaning. Meaning is something you have once learnt. " My answer was accepted. That particular researcher´s definition for meaning is that you learn them.
It is curious to think how seldom we think of meanings, of how they are given and how we continuously participate in various meaning making processes.
I have a friend who is active in water skiing. Active groups of water skiers in St Petersburg and Tampere have decided to start co-operation. In June they arranged a competition in St Petersburg and during this weekend another one here in Tampere. In addition to Russians and Finns there are participants from Latvia and Lithuania as well. Their goal is to build a competition of international importance.
I find their water skiing activity an exellent example of meaning making. We can choose any idea, in the same way as they have done, and start developing it. Or maybe, it is the other way round, the idea chooses us and we start to work to make it become something more or less concrete. Winnie the Pooh thinks that the originator is the idea: it is not that he would be hungry, they are the honey pots that are sending inviting messages to him. If you want to have a closer look at this discussion, you could read, for instance An Introduction to Social Constructionism by Vivien Burr (ISBN: 0-415-10405-X).
Winnie the Pooh points out an important matter when refering to the inviting honey pots. "/.../det finns tolv honungsburkar i mitt skafferi, och de har ropat på mig i timmar. Jag kunde inte höra dem ordentligt förut, för Kanin bara pratade, men om ingen säger något utom de tolv burkarna, Nasse, så kommer jag att veta, varifrån de ropar." (Hoff, Benjamin: Tao engligt Puh, ISBN: 91-46-15383-7)
Winnie the Pooh´s reasoning brings the ten-people-per-day concept under reconsideration. We need silence to hear the ideas when they are inviting us.
Another modification of ten-people-per-day idea is that talking to a total stranger could count two or three people you know well beforehand. You never know what kind of worlds a total stranger will invite you to.
I met Sergey at the water skiing competition. What he told about his normal life in St Petersburg opened a new world to me. I had no idea about algorithmic training before. Sergey is also an excellent pitcher. He knows how to pitch professionals and for lay people he has a special version of his company´s elevator talk.
I know now that algorithmic training makes it possible to chart the value differences between various stock exchanges at any moment. In a way his company sells time for a good price. Time, especially speed, has become an interesting commodity. "You can show people significant statistics and beautiful diagrams and they drop to sleep. But immediately when you start talking about speed, everybody is fully awake." Sergey said.
It would be very interesting to know how the concept of time will be changed in the becoming years. As regard to speed, does the world become a flat screen instead of being a globe? The Finnish summer night in June has a great potiential of speed. In july it is slowing down as if it took a special time off to smell the strawberries.
Sometimes my mind likes to take me back to school. The matriculation examination is approaching. I have passed all exams with flying colours, only the mathematics is left and I haven´t even taken part in the compulsory courses. Now I have to go to the teacher and tell him the terrible truth: No chances, no way. - You can imagine how happy I feel waking up in the middle of my present life that has nothing to do with school or mathematics and where everything looks more or less manageable.
Last night my mind decided to test me. I was asked how the researcher so-and-so defines meaning. I had no idea, because I had not read the book I should have. Anyhow I decided to take the test. My mind has obviously entered the internet age, because the test was given on four parallel screens.
I touched the first screen and saw a series of events on it. "Well there is meaning in that, of course, because everything carries meaning. But this obviously isn´t what that particular researcher means with meaning." Then I touched the second screen. That showed a series of events as well. The difference was that something was taken away from the picture. It was taken away and anyway it now had a meaning. The same occured on the third screen. "All right, I thought. The physical presence of the thing is not needed to give a special meaning. Meaning is something you have once learnt. " My answer was accepted. That particular researcher´s definition for meaning is that you learn them.
It is curious to think how seldom we think of meanings, of how they are given and how we continuously participate in various meaning making processes.
I have a friend who is active in water skiing. Active groups of water skiers in St Petersburg and Tampere have decided to start co-operation. In June they arranged a competition in St Petersburg and during this weekend another one here in Tampere. In addition to Russians and Finns there are participants from Latvia and Lithuania as well. Their goal is to build a competition of international importance.
I find their water skiing activity an exellent example of meaning making. We can choose any idea, in the same way as they have done, and start developing it. Or maybe, it is the other way round, the idea chooses us and we start to work to make it become something more or less concrete. Winnie the Pooh thinks that the originator is the idea: it is not that he would be hungry, they are the honey pots that are sending inviting messages to him. If you want to have a closer look at this discussion, you could read, for instance An Introduction to Social Constructionism by Vivien Burr (ISBN: 0-415-10405-X).
Winnie the Pooh points out an important matter when refering to the inviting honey pots. "/.../det finns tolv honungsburkar i mitt skafferi, och de har ropat på mig i timmar. Jag kunde inte höra dem ordentligt förut, för Kanin bara pratade, men om ingen säger något utom de tolv burkarna, Nasse, så kommer jag att veta, varifrån de ropar." (Hoff, Benjamin: Tao engligt Puh, ISBN: 91-46-15383-7)
Winnie the Pooh´s reasoning brings the ten-people-per-day concept under reconsideration. We need silence to hear the ideas when they are inviting us.
Another modification of ten-people-per-day idea is that talking to a total stranger could count two or three people you know well beforehand. You never know what kind of worlds a total stranger will invite you to.
I met Sergey at the water skiing competition. What he told about his normal life in St Petersburg opened a new world to me. I had no idea about algorithmic training before. Sergey is also an excellent pitcher. He knows how to pitch professionals and for lay people he has a special version of his company´s elevator talk.
I know now that algorithmic training makes it possible to chart the value differences between various stock exchanges at any moment. In a way his company sells time for a good price. Time, especially speed, has become an interesting commodity. "You can show people significant statistics and beautiful diagrams and they drop to sleep. But immediately when you start talking about speed, everybody is fully awake." Sergey said.
It would be very interesting to know how the concept of time will be changed in the becoming years. As regard to speed, does the world become a flat screen instead of being a globe? The Finnish summer night in June has a great potiential of speed. In july it is slowing down as if it took a special time off to smell the strawberries.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Healing Stories
Power is created when people come together and start doing something together. That has been said by Hannah Arendt. Power is related to people and their common activities.
Our former president Kekkonen had an unsurpassed talent of gaining power. You cannot have power unless you meet people. He is told to have had the rule of meeting at least ten people per day. In the Middle Ages kings could not have permanent residences. They had to travel around their territories all the time to meet the ten people for their own power´s sake.
Since Thursday I have been counting the number of people I meet daily. Not paying attention to the importance of meeting people I could happily stay at home for a couple of weeks and then feel totally suffocated.
Thursday was more a less a good day. I do not even remember what happened then. Friday was a bit problematic. The first meeting in the morning was surrounded by cold water. The hot Finnish summer days were over, at least for the time being, and that makes the water in the lakes pretty cool. Anyway, I found out that aquajogging is my sport. A couple of minutes jogging makes the cold water turn warm. Aquajogging feels absolutely childish and my body seems to like that.
After aquajogging I met my mother to take her to acupuncture. Meetings with your mother do not count - I suppose.
After that I met a friend of mine in the open-air market place. We had sardinas asadas for lunch. Maybe I should say sardinas asadas finlandesas, because coregonus albula has never seen any salt before being spread on a frying pan in the market place. The lunch was delicious.
I missed an afternoon meeting sleeping deep and sound. That meant that I still needed to meet eight people to make it ten per day. Luckily there was one more meeting to go to. When coming back home I wished I had never gone there.
This is what happened: I simply broke the rules of decent group behaviour taking a position of power that I wasn´t entitled for. I got so much involved in wondering why someone had difficulties answering the question: "What have you learnt since we last met?" that I started testing different questions to find out some kind of answer. I was caught up by curiosity. Baruch Spinoza would say that I was caught by a passion, which according to him is always a questionable thing to do.
The others must have found my questioning embarassing. My tunnel vision was focused on that one person only. I simply did not sense the warning signals the others must have been sending to me.
I made a mistake and I got a punishment straight away - somebody started going around with a coffee pot exactly when it was my turn to answer that same question. My immediate interpretation was that she was making a mistake. She was behaving in an unacceptable way. I was blaming her in my mind. Luckily I had no opportunity to tell it to her.
Maybe you have experienced what it feels like to be in a group where everybody thinks that you have done a stupidity and there is an unanimous agreement not to show that to anybody. Anyway, everybody knows what has been going on. I think the name for the feeling you enter is shame. You feel shame for yourself and they feel shame and pity for you.
No one wants to experience feelings of shame. In normal life there is no shame. Neither should there be feelings of pity. Baruch Spinoza says that pity is a kind of sorrow or sadness that we feel when something bad has happened to somebody whom we understand to be alike to us. What has happened to her could have happened to me. We feel sad and that makes us unable to approach the feelings of joy and happiness which are vital energy sources of human life.
Feelings of shame and pity indicate that life is in imbalance, its bits and pieces do not fit together. Your mind is agitated and starts shooting harrasing fire in your body.
I came home and started feeling really terrible weighing and pondering all that had happened. As there was no one else to blame besides myself, I had to find a way out. I had to start analysing: What had I done? What made it stupid? Was there perhaps something not that much stupid in it? What had the other people done? Why? What was bad in that? Was there perhaps something good as well?
This is how we story things. Normal life is normal. It does not breed any questioning. Neither does it produce stories. In the beginning of a story there is always a breakage, a disturbance of a status quo.
It was not until later in the evening that I realised that pouring coffee was not bad behaviour. It was my punishment. In fact, a very delicate way to tell me that I had made a mistake.
If my dog Uffe goes outside the gate he knows that he is doing something wrong. Having come back he goes immediately to the bathroom door and expects to be shut in. That is his punishment. He knows that taking the punishment straightens the situation. A couple of times I have tried not to punish him, but that makes him feel bad. So we have an agreement that the system of punishment and forgiving works automatically if he knowingly does something unacceptable.
There is still one aspect of the probemt situation needing explanation - the role of the person whom I cross-examined to find an answer for the question What have you learnt since we last met? I have no clue why she had difficulties answering the question. However, I found one explanation. Maybe she wanted people to pay a special attention to her. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn´t. Anyway, that happened.
The explanation suits perfectly to MY needs. And now I had enough stories to explain what happened in the situation. My mind found the end result satisfactory. The breakage was healed and the experience filed.
Meeting ten people a day might prove out a bit challenging. The necessary encouragement comes from Spinoza. According to him the lot of a wise person is to nourish and refresh herself with moderate and pleasurable food and drink, pleasing scents, the beauty of green plants, charming jewelry, sports games, theatre and other matters that can be enjoyed without harming other people. Spinoza says "without harming other people". He does not say with ten people. Maybe I had better relax and not worry about numbers.
My source for Spinoza is Pietarinen, Juhani: Ilon filosofia, Yliopistopaino, Helsinki, 1993. In English there certainly are several texts to be found also in the category Spinoza made easy.
Besides sensory enjoyment there are other forms of joy and pleasure Spinoza talks about, but no matter what they are, they, too, need to be storied properly. Stories have both creating and healing power - and they need a breakage in the beginning.
By the way - Seela´s comment on my article Stories to think about is worth reading. It is in Finnish. If you enjoy translating Seela´s text on ants and Buenos Aires, that would be very kind of you!
Our former president Kekkonen had an unsurpassed talent of gaining power. You cannot have power unless you meet people. He is told to have had the rule of meeting at least ten people per day. In the Middle Ages kings could not have permanent residences. They had to travel around their territories all the time to meet the ten people for their own power´s sake.
Since Thursday I have been counting the number of people I meet daily. Not paying attention to the importance of meeting people I could happily stay at home for a couple of weeks and then feel totally suffocated.
Thursday was more a less a good day. I do not even remember what happened then. Friday was a bit problematic. The first meeting in the morning was surrounded by cold water. The hot Finnish summer days were over, at least for the time being, and that makes the water in the lakes pretty cool. Anyway, I found out that aquajogging is my sport. A couple of minutes jogging makes the cold water turn warm. Aquajogging feels absolutely childish and my body seems to like that.
After aquajogging I met my mother to take her to acupuncture. Meetings with your mother do not count - I suppose.
After that I met a friend of mine in the open-air market place. We had sardinas asadas for lunch. Maybe I should say sardinas asadas finlandesas, because coregonus albula has never seen any salt before being spread on a frying pan in the market place. The lunch was delicious.
I missed an afternoon meeting sleeping deep and sound. That meant that I still needed to meet eight people to make it ten per day. Luckily there was one more meeting to go to. When coming back home I wished I had never gone there.
This is what happened: I simply broke the rules of decent group behaviour taking a position of power that I wasn´t entitled for. I got so much involved in wondering why someone had difficulties answering the question: "What have you learnt since we last met?" that I started testing different questions to find out some kind of answer. I was caught up by curiosity. Baruch Spinoza would say that I was caught by a passion, which according to him is always a questionable thing to do.
The others must have found my questioning embarassing. My tunnel vision was focused on that one person only. I simply did not sense the warning signals the others must have been sending to me.
I made a mistake and I got a punishment straight away - somebody started going around with a coffee pot exactly when it was my turn to answer that same question. My immediate interpretation was that she was making a mistake. She was behaving in an unacceptable way. I was blaming her in my mind. Luckily I had no opportunity to tell it to her.
Maybe you have experienced what it feels like to be in a group where everybody thinks that you have done a stupidity and there is an unanimous agreement not to show that to anybody. Anyway, everybody knows what has been going on. I think the name for the feeling you enter is shame. You feel shame for yourself and they feel shame and pity for you.
No one wants to experience feelings of shame. In normal life there is no shame. Neither should there be feelings of pity. Baruch Spinoza says that pity is a kind of sorrow or sadness that we feel when something bad has happened to somebody whom we understand to be alike to us. What has happened to her could have happened to me. We feel sad and that makes us unable to approach the feelings of joy and happiness which are vital energy sources of human life.
Feelings of shame and pity indicate that life is in imbalance, its bits and pieces do not fit together. Your mind is agitated and starts shooting harrasing fire in your body.
I came home and started feeling really terrible weighing and pondering all that had happened. As there was no one else to blame besides myself, I had to find a way out. I had to start analysing: What had I done? What made it stupid? Was there perhaps something not that much stupid in it? What had the other people done? Why? What was bad in that? Was there perhaps something good as well?
This is how we story things. Normal life is normal. It does not breed any questioning. Neither does it produce stories. In the beginning of a story there is always a breakage, a disturbance of a status quo.
It was not until later in the evening that I realised that pouring coffee was not bad behaviour. It was my punishment. In fact, a very delicate way to tell me that I had made a mistake.
If my dog Uffe goes outside the gate he knows that he is doing something wrong. Having come back he goes immediately to the bathroom door and expects to be shut in. That is his punishment. He knows that taking the punishment straightens the situation. A couple of times I have tried not to punish him, but that makes him feel bad. So we have an agreement that the system of punishment and forgiving works automatically if he knowingly does something unacceptable.
There is still one aspect of the probemt situation needing explanation - the role of the person whom I cross-examined to find an answer for the question What have you learnt since we last met? I have no clue why she had difficulties answering the question. However, I found one explanation. Maybe she wanted people to pay a special attention to her. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn´t. Anyway, that happened.
The explanation suits perfectly to MY needs. And now I had enough stories to explain what happened in the situation. My mind found the end result satisfactory. The breakage was healed and the experience filed.
Meeting ten people a day might prove out a bit challenging. The necessary encouragement comes from Spinoza. According to him the lot of a wise person is to nourish and refresh herself with moderate and pleasurable food and drink, pleasing scents, the beauty of green plants, charming jewelry, sports games, theatre and other matters that can be enjoyed without harming other people. Spinoza says "without harming other people". He does not say with ten people. Maybe I had better relax and not worry about numbers.
My source for Spinoza is Pietarinen, Juhani: Ilon filosofia, Yliopistopaino, Helsinki, 1993. In English there certainly are several texts to be found also in the category Spinoza made easy.
Besides sensory enjoyment there are other forms of joy and pleasure Spinoza talks about, but no matter what they are, they, too, need to be storied properly. Stories have both creating and healing power - and they need a breakage in the beginning.
By the way - Seela´s comment on my article Stories to think about is worth reading. It is in Finnish. If you enjoy translating Seela´s text on ants and Buenos Aires, that would be very kind of you!
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