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."