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!