Stories and Russian roulette

My mother had no possibility to get any academic education. "She is good enough for the plywood factory." her mother said to the teacher who came to tell her that the daughter should be sent to a secondary school. Instead of getting an academic education my mother became a specialised children´s nurse and a midwife. Today she is an enviable representative of the Finnish well-schooled generation who re-built this this country after the war and she can enjoy a proper retirement allowance.

There was a time in the late 1960´s going on through the 70´s that Finnish people still believed in Paradise. And it was not a matter of belief only. They had concrete evidence of its existence. In the autumn many members of their own family, their friends and neighbours left their houses still and empty and travelled away by bus and by train. Next summer they came back looking happy and driving their own new cars. My mother was a midwife in the south of Lapland, where this was very normal and little by little she had less and less work, because the majority of the babies of the municipality were now born in Sweden.

Mother wanted to learn to speak Swedish, just in case. She applied for a scholarship to take part in a course. In the application form she was asked about her previous knowledge of Swedish. She had never learned Swedish at school so I asked how she had defined her level of knowledge of it. "I wrote that I read, but I do not understand." she said. The same happens to me when I read Fooled by Randomness, The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nocholas Taleb (ISBN: 978-0-141-03148-4). I do not understand the text, but I keep on reading.

Taleb´s text is worth reading just because it is highly enjoyable. It carries you forward to the next chapter, to the next page and then again to the next. I keep on reading as if I were addicted to it. Additionally Taleb describes a world I have very few ideas and no experience about, except that last summer I met Sergey from St Petersburg. It is nice to think that he is an actor in the trading world that Taleb describes like this:

"One of the attractive aspects of my profession as a quantitative option trader is that I have close to 95 % of my day free to think, read, research (or "reflect" in the gym, on ski slopes, or, more effectively, on a park bench). I also had the privilege of frequently "working" from my well-equipped attic."

I do not know if this is exactly true in Sergey´s case, but he looked relaxed and he was enthusiastic about his job. Because it was summer, we did not meet on a ski slope, but by a small lake in a water-skiing competition. I think there are enough matching facts here.

Taleb says that the human mind is not designed to understand how the world works. It is designed to get us out of trouble rapidly and have children - equally rapidly, I would like to add.

He also states that although life looks like a sequence of hesitation and bewilderment and feels like that, in the hindsight it is not. In retrospective everything looks as if we had always known what to do and how to choose. When looking back at our past, we see it well-planned and beautifully organised. There is no doubt nor vacilation, just straight lines and well motivated direct routes. Everything looks neatly ordered and reasonable. This phenomenon is called the ´hindsight bias´, the conviction that what has happened was bound to happen.

Because of the hindsight bias any catastrophy looks to us having been predictable before it actually happened. The Twin Towers collapse is one example of this phenomenon. Similarly, if something is regarded as an error in the present, it is as if the erroneus character of the matter had been recognizable in the past as well. Taleb says that it was not. Nobody could have told beforehand what would happen (to the Twin Towers). He also says that nobody will be able to say what the nect catastrophy is, but it having taken place, we will interprete some phenomena to be its traces. After we will have defined what these traces are, they become visible. Once visible, we will be unable to wipe them out.

Narrative approach to life and meaning making would say that we abhore chaos. Chaos is like a puzzle the pieces of which have been thrown into the air. There is no meaning in the separate pieces. However, life needs to make sense. A healthy human mind invents order and starts making sense, if there is none readily detectable in the experience. As this tendency is - and has been - common to all of us, we have developed sense-making systems, slots or plots in which the chaotic elements are fitted. In this process what was chaotic, becomes a well-organised story. Individual meaning-elements get trapped into stories and stories are the currency we exchange when we communicate with each other.

What does this have to do with normal life? To be an expert in any field means that you understand the stories and jokes related to it. A necessary prerequisite to understanding is that you have acquired enough personal knowledge to be able to evaluate what is normal and acceptable and what is not. If you are unable to distinguish the normal from the deviant, you do not know how you are supposed to react to a story and when you should laugh if someone is telling a joke.

When reading Taleb´s text I know that I am able to enjoy it as a form of literature, but I miss a lot of the knowledge and information he delivers. I do not know exactly when to laugh and how to feel. It is irritating. Sergey and his colleagues would gain much more from Fooled by Randomness, because they know what is normal in the trading and probability business and what is not.

Books contain universes. It is a privilege to be able to even try to visit them. One more thing I learned when reading Fooled by Randomness is that probability is a qualitative subject, not just a number game. 10 million dollars earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as the 10 milloin dollars earned through diligent and artful practice of dentistry. Sorry to say that I am not a dentist either. There seems to be just the Russian roulette left. - And maybe, it looks perfectly normal in the hindsight.

Belisa Crepusculario

Belisa Crepusculario lived selling words to people. She travelled all around the country. Everywhere she was known for the good quality of her merchandise. Her prices were fair. For seven cents she improved the quality of dreams, for nine cents she wrote love letters, for twelve cents she made up terrible insults. She sold also stories, long reality based narratives which she told fluently, without leaving anything out.

Belisa´s narratives brought news from one village to the other. People paid her to add a couple of events into her narrative: a child has been born, our children have got married, so-and-so has died, the harvest has got burnt.

Wherever Belisa went people gathered around her to hear her talk. This way they learnt about the life of others, about their distant relatives and about events in the civil war.

Whoever paid Belisa Crepusculario fifty cents could buy a secret word that frightened off melancholy and sadness. It was not the same word for all people - of course not - because that would have been a collective betrayal. Everyone who received his or her own word could be sure that no one else in the whole universe used the same word.

I have long admired Belisa Crepusculario. We are colleagues. She is a role model for me. Lately my normal life has meant that I spend my days searching and collecting ideas, dressing them into words, phrases and sentences that would make pictures and films in other people´s minds, and all the time making my best effort to get everything wrapped up in a nice marketable form - ready to sail on the blue ocean markets of organizational training. The central topics around which all this has been taking place are tacit knowledge and theories of learning and teachning. The language is English. A special tribute is paid to Ikujiro Nonaka, Barbara Czarniawska, Kenneth Gergen, Vilma Hänninen etc.

As human beings we look for meanings. If none is found, we start inventing some. We enter in the world of plots and stories. The real trick happens when we, as human beings, set our stories side by side and start comparing them. A Finnish poetess Edit Södergran refers to this in her poem

You looked for a flower
and found a fruit.
You looked for a well
and found a sea.
You looked for a woman
and found a soul -
I disappoint you.

Buscabas una flor
y encontraste un fruto.
Buscabas una fuente
y encontraste un mar.
Buscabas una mujer
y encontraste un alma -
estás decepcionado.

Edit Södergran reminds me of Belisa Crepusculario. She lived in the Finnish speaking countryside, but her native tongue was Swedish - the variation of the Swedish language that is spoken in Finland and that has been strongly influenced by Finnish. In these circumstances Edit Södergran learned to weigh and appreciate individual words and their possibilities to be related to one another. - Sometimes exactly the things you do not have become your long-term treasures.They may even last from one generation to another.

What does all this have to do with normal life in Finland? The quickly and steadily approaching winter goes on undressing the nature and emptying space for itself to settle in. Everyday Finland resembles more and more the poems by Edit Södergran and Eeva-Liisa Manner (maybe you still remember her poem "If grief smoked earth would be shrouded in smoke."). As a result of this we will have a lot of emptiness and space where you can install your meanings. However, one interesting aspect of this is that your cerebral and sensory-motor systems will simultaneusly become slow-motion operated. Because of this you may not find any reasons, why you should be actively looking for the special excitement of establishing new connections between what is and what might also be.

Anyway, if you want to have some concrete usefulness of reading this text, it might be a nice idea to know one more thing. Provided you are spending your youth as an Erasmus student here in Finland and provided you would like to fall desperately in love with a girl having an academic background, it might be worth remembering a couple of sentences from the poems by Edit Södergran and Eeva-Liisa Manner. They have a certain exchange value in the market of affects and emotions.

It is also worth knowing that Belisa Crepusculario´s family was poor. They were so poor that they could not even afford having names for their children. This meant that she had to search for a suitable name for herself. One day she found the name Belisa Crepusculario and she dressed it on.

In case you want to know more about my colleague Belisa, you can meet her in the book Cuentos de Eva Luna by Isabel Alende ISBN: 84-8450-509-X).

What you are dressed in might be worth exploring as well. Have a nice weekend!

There was no French Revolution

"He lived just from autumn until Christmas."

How do you know which nation you belong to? You can´t be a member of any nation without being able to recognize some special "signs" that bind people together to form exatly that particular nation. Among those commonly recognized "signs" binding individuals to become nations are sentences like "He lived just from autumn until Christmas." or "As we all know, God is almighty, omnipotent and foresighted." "If grief smoked, earth would be shrouded in smoke."

The third sentence is the beginning of a poem by Eeva-Liisa Manner. She is one of the most important Finnish poetesses. Maybe you would like to know that

If grief smoked
earth would be shrouded in smoke.
Yet this grief too has fire beneath,
my heart burns but does not burn out.

Si la pena humease,
la tierra estaría cubierta de humo.
Sin embargo esta pena también tiene debajo un fuego,
mi corazón arde, pero no se consume.

My second example of the nation-building sentences is: "As we all know, God is almighty, omnipotent and foresighted." It is the opening sentence of the novel The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna. The Unknown Soldier was published in 1954. It was the first book that did not describe the second world war as a heroic battle of heroic soldiers. It was absolutely the first of its kind. It was telling that life in the front was hard, opinions about the war variable, but the goal shared. Ask any Finnish ceo or top manager about their favourite leadership books and The Unknown Soldier will be among them. It is very likely to be number one in the list. Even 95 % of all Finnish teenage boys have read it with pleasure - girls too, but they are likely to have read some other books as well.

Before we changed the currency to euros, we had Finnish marks. The last sentence of the Unknown Soldier was written on the twenty-mark-note: "Hyväntahtoinen aurinko katseli heitä. Se ei missään tapauksessa ollut heille vihainen. Kenties se tunsi jonkinlaista myötätuntoakin heitä kohtaan. Aika velikultia."

If you ever get interested in learning to know normal life in Finland, it is worth finding out what has been written between those two sentences "As we all know, God is almighty, omnipotent and foresighted." and "/.../ Aika velikultia."

Now I have to confess that I do not have the English version of The Unknown Soldier, but I have it in Norwegian. It says first: "Som vi jo alle vet, er Vårherre fremsynt og allvitende over all forstand." and the last: "Solen så vennlig på dem. Iallfall ikke uvennlig. Hadde kanskje tilmed en slags medfölelse med dem. Vennene, stallbrödrene." (Sorry Norwegians for the ö!)

About the Russian version of The Unknown Soldier I know that some parts of the text have been omitted or changed. The Soviet publisher did not like the way we Finns described the war between us. - If you want to do business with the Finns, reading The Unknown Soldier is highly recommendable.

I started this text with the sentence: "He lived just from autumn until Christmas." It refers to Aleksis Kivi He is the first Finnish professional author. What it meant to be a writer before computers can be seen in the manuscripts. Aleksis Kivi was born on the 10.10. 1834 and died in 1872 at Christmas. For several reasons his life is considered to have been sad. If you come to Finland in the beginning of October and stay until Christmas, you easily get an idea how exactly it was.

Practically all the deciduous trees are now bare. Their branches and twigs are scraping the sky that is getting further and further away simultaneously swallowing light, becoming cold and distant-looking. When you get out into the open-air, the wind bites you sharply enough to remind you of the necessity to put on a warm overcoat, gloves, and a cap, lange unterhose etc.

Winter is approaching. Today in the morning we had snow, even here in the south of the country. The soil is still warm enough to melt most of it during the day, but if you left your car out in the open-air last night, you will still find it covered by white, dry and clean snow.

All the scenery changes. Days are getting shorter and shorter. People start dreaming about travelling to the tropics where there is sunshine and palm trees. Those who stay here start talking about the weather: "They had minus twenty centigrade in Jyväskylä." "Oh yes, but in Oulu they had minus thirty-one, and the terrible wind from the sea." - You can be sure that the British talking about their weather will be just amateurs in comparison with us winter-time Finns.

Maybe I´ll share this arctic-hysteria description with you in Spanish. It is a poem by Arvo Turtiainen describing cold January nights with fifty degrees centigrade and the stars biting the bread of the frost. I do not know us ever having had minus fifty - anyway this is not Siberia - but fifty rhymes better than twenty-five, for instance.

50 grados bajo cero

En las noches de enero
crujen dientes de las estrellas
al morder
el pan del frío.

En las noches de enero
navega la luna
como un ataúd
rumbo a su gélido infierno azul.

Los bosques negros
se estremecen.
Se congelan
las cortinas de la aurea boreal.

En las noches de enero
resplandece
el puñal del frío
en la mano de la muerte.

All nations have something that combines people together to form a nation - sentences, poemas, songs, sceneries. To become a member - a fellow citizen - you need to know enough of them. If you do not know any, you have no idea of the normal life of those people, you do not know how they have organised their life and how they want to be communicated with.

By the way, did you know that there never was any French Revolution? People in France lived their normal life. It got overwhelmingly difficult, so they started protesting. There were protests here and there, and as life did not get any better, the protests spread over a longer period of time. Then somebody was looking at the tumultous period from outside and collected all those separate incidents under one name ´revolution´. When people abroad referred to everything happening in France, the ´French Revolution´ was born. If nobody had given that special label to what was happening, we might never have had The French Revolution that became rather a popular export product.

If you want to know more about nations and imagination, you could read Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson (ISBN:0-86091-546-8). It has been translated into Finnish as well. Reading Imagined Communities you´ll learn that we as various nations are invited into the history. In what language, via which signs and sentences, was the invitation card of your nation printed?

Changing Surroundings

What do you live surrounded by? I mean several alternative, time-related answers - normally, lately, and just now?

Once, long time ago, somebody said to me: "You are surrounded by angels." - I was caught by a total surprise. I still remember how tired and down I was just at that moment. It was in the middle of some general, long-term life hazzle. She just stopped what she was doing, looked at me and said those words. I knew that she was telling the truth. Immediately her words made a nest in my mind. I started wondering why I hadn´t realised the same myself.

Every now and then the general life hazzles make use of different opportunities and show us what we are surrounded by. Sometimes you look at the people around you and instead of seeing just the person, you see the surroundings as well. When I read Tobias´s blog I become convinced that he is surrounded by friends. No matter where he goes and what he does he has numerous and irreplaceable friendships surrounnding him. Maybe he does not realise himself how exceptional that is.

When I look at my 88-year-old mother she is surrounded by gentleness and light. I do not mean that she would be similar to the self-luminous dog created and exhibited by an artist whose name and nationality I have forgotten. It is just that my mother has stopped being and feeling somehow important and anyhow remarkable. She concentrates on enjoying the present moment as it is and not as it should be.

Some time ago I realised that I am surrounded by worries and feelings of guilt. I also realised that it was nothing occasional and temporary. It had become my normal life. When something becomes normal it escapes from sight and becomes in a way invisible. If there is no contrast anywhere, the invisible remains impossible to see. In this case the contrasting or meaning-making idea was my own simple question: Can I afford this? My answer was a short and simple No.

Just at present I am reading about tacit knowledge and educational practices. Research on adult learning reveals that more learning happened in periods that people perceived as good versus bad times. Nearly ten times more significant learning occurred in the good times than in the bad. Anyhow, learning that is likely to be transformative and change your life will occur in bad times.

From the learning point of view it does not matter, whether you feel good or bad. Feeling bad enough is likely to have greater effect on you and change your life, one way or other. You just have to go through a transition process, embark upon the no-man´s land between the old reality and the new. The old way is gone and the new doesn´t yet feel comfortable enough.

It is like autumn in Finland just at present. Days are getting shorter and shorter. All colourful leaves have started to fall down. The nature is breathing deeply before falling to sleep under the snow. If we Finns were just human beings, we would go to sleep as well. However, we are human doings and that makes us go on as if we were equally eneregetic as we are when the days are long and the night is squeezed to its minimum between them.

Now the leaves are slowly falling down, the over-grown grass is covered by yellow, organge and red leaves, we are surrounded by the autumn, in a transition, between the doors, closed-behind and not-yet-open-in-the-front.

Any morning in a couple of weeks´ time there will be first signs of frost everywhere and ice on the roads. Motoristis who haven´t changed winter tyres for their cars before that particular morning, will get into trouble and risk many other people´s lives.

Everybody knows that that special morning is approaching, and anyhow it catches very many Finns by a total surprise, as if it never happened before. Maybe it does not matter what you are surrounded by unless you draw some conclusions of it.

"If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs."