Recognizing Treasures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Umbrella-Stories and Unemployed People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empty Space in front of Activities

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wish you empty spaces between your thoughts and acitvities!

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

Pareto Principle in Lapland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wouldn´t that be worth experiencing?

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

Fact, Fiction and Testimonio

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

He is Paavo Haavikko. She is Eeva Kilpi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Adults and Baby-Swimming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Makes a Family?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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