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.