The Most Important Learning

There is a study indicating that people in French bistros touch each other 110 times per hour. In English pubs they touch one another an average of three times an hour. Finnish pubs have not been studied.

If you asked me, what I have done lately, I would answer ´Nothing special.´ With no further questions we would pass over to other, probably more interesting topics - the lack of snow and plans for the summer. Sometimes what we name ´Nothing special´ hides something that would be worth paying attention to. Words are used as camouflage. The most important messages are the hidden messages.

´Nothing special´indicates mental laziness. It is an effort to shift the communicative responsibility onto the other person´s shoulders: "You talk. Me listen."

Many of us feel comfortable only when there is somebody else to tell us what to decide, what to do, what to pay attention to. In other words we would prefer having a mother or a wife to organize and control our life. There are men who have a wife whose main function is to control their drinking.

I´m not that much different. I would like to have a wife as well. However, I do not have any, and my mother has always been very reluctant to lead my life. This means that I am compelled to personally activate myself and shift gears to become socially active.

In Finland we are not supposed to talk too much. Nor are we supposed to emphasize our personal comings and goings. That makes it easy to evade building really meaningful social contacts. We appreciate quiet and withdrawing people. We automatically connect those characteristics with intelligence and trustworthiness. You never know what talkative people might end up to. If you are really enthusiastic about something, you had better pretend that you aren´t - that much.

Human beings and dogs are alike. Both are snifflers. No matter who we meet and in what kind of circumstances, we sniffle each other to be able to decide what to do next. Every group of people sends particular messages that you need to recognise if you want to become an accepted member. All cultures have their physical signs to show expertise, professionalism, friendship etc. These rules can be broken, of course, but breaking them makes it more difficult to find shared goals and objectives. A couple of Italians in a Finnish supermarket are easy to detect. Normally behaving Finns in a French bistro must look either stupid or hostile.

Anyway, being a talented sniffler, you never take ´Nothing special´ as a definite answer. Mine wasn´t that either. Really - it wasn´t any nothing-special-week.

On Saturday I went to Helsinki to a business seminar to learn how to build a learning organization "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole (reality) together." (Senge, The Fifth Discipline)

My long-term dream is to build a truly learning organization and I highly appreciate my team memebers who I share this goal with. It is exciting and intriguing to follow this process, to experience what empowerment means in practice.

Straightaway on Sunday we decided to have a nice and quiet strategy meeting with some people at Pajutila. Having arrived there, it was easy to see that the meeting would be nice, but not quiet. The place was absolutely crowded with people because of the 50 per cent sale that had just started. Two enjoyable events for the same day! We just postponed the meeting for later in the evening.

However, those events did not make the past week memorable. There will be other seminars and other opportunities to go to sales. Things and events that can be repeated do not necessarily require any special attention. That is why they tend to just flow away and be replaced by other things and events. Best we remember events that will never occur again and people we won´t be able to meet some other time as well.

My aunt was at the terminal care centre Pirkanmaan hoitokoti close to my house. I went to see her several times a day, which proved that we do not have time, we make it.

As time producing beings we constantly choose what we have time for and what we do with it - as long as there is still some time left in our personal allottment. Hers was getting scanty. Last night there was no more left.

What did I learn during that week?

In our life there are two kinds of people - those we can meet again and those we can´t.

If you have friends whom you meet once every five or ten years, you had better count how many times there are still left - and behave accordingly.

When sniffling around you meet people that might be interesting to learn to know better, do not hesitate to tell them that. Invite them to a French bistro or to an English pub. We have learned all our behaviour patterns in various cultural contexts. If your own culture does not teach you the value of touching, you need to learn from other cultures.

My most important learning during the past week was that when somebody´s allotted time is running out, being present, holding the hand, caressing the cheeks, rubbing the back is the only thing that you can do. And it is the only thing that has any real importance.