Northern Activities

My father had excavators and bulldozers. Their engines were so big that they had to be started by means of a special inbuilt starting engine.

The engine proper may be big and efficient, but without a well-functioning starting engine it is worthless.

Christmastime made me remember my father´s excavators and bulldozers for several reasons. In the beginning of the holiday season I thought that my own engines have just run out of fuel. Having no energy for anything you just want to sleep and sleep and sleep. They say that the special charm of sleeping lies in the fact that in sleep we need not use any energy for controlling our thoughts. Sleeping means saving fuel.

Later I was a bit afraid thinking that maybe it is not just a starting engine problem. The main engine might be kaput. Need more fuel to be able to check the situation.

When are we free? I heard a programme on the radio about free time and free time activities. The general complaint was that free time has become something we feel obliged to fill in with activities in the same way the working time is filled with various tasks and duties. The difference between free time and working time is that the working life activities are more or less given to us. We know what we are supposed to do, but free time is something you need to organize yourself. You make the choices. In other words, you are free, but you need to use your energy to control your thoughts and activities. Instead of generating energy, our programmable free time consumes it. In these circumstances the only possibility to be really free is to sleep.

We had a serious conversation with my daughter. The basic idea she wanted to express was that she never learned to "be by herself". She never saw me just "being by myself". All the time there´s some kind of goal oriented activity going on, probably something worth being included into the cv.

My daughter was right. For generations my family has been known as diligent hardworking people. My father´s family lived on a big lake. There was no road to their tiny farm. On the other side of the lake lived another big family. Their farm was equally small and had no road either.

The difference between the social status of those two families was, however, clear. In my father´s family all of the eight children had their own pair of shoes. On the other side of the lake the children had to share only one pair of shoes. They had less freedom than my father´s family, especially in winter. For instance they had to go out to the toilet taking turns, because walking bare foot on the snow is out of question - unless you are returning from the sauna bath. Additionally that was the time before climatic disturbances.

My mother´s family was no better. My grandfather owned barges and transported wood to St Petersburgh. It was still sailing time when the October revolution in 1917 started. My grandmother told us that someone had come to tell them that shooting was starting and they had better sail back to Finland.

Alongside wood my grandfather traded luxury goods from St Petersburgh. When you have a scalable profession, you need to pay attention to anything around you. You never know where and when business opportunities knock. You learn to be active at all times and in all relations - and that attitude is not only contagious but also hereditary.

Maybe you live in Finland and want to build a house or renovate it. You hire men to do that. It might be useful to know a couple of things first. One of them is that the men come in and they start planning the project with you. Instead of encouraging and complimenting you for all the decisions you have made so far, they will tell you why the project is extremely difficult, expensive and, in fact, absolutely impossible. Listening to them you feel how your own enthusiasm starts fading out. You feel desperate and ashamed and you want to apologise for ever having dreamt of any new or renovated house.

Just when your self-esteem has sunk to the bottom of the ocean, one of the workmen finds a possible solution for one of the problems, then there is another solution for another problem, then one more, until all of the terrible problems have been solved. Still feeling weak you return back to the surface understanding that it is exactly this particular group of heroes you need to hire if you ever want to live in your beautiful dream house - and you feel a special pride for having this opportunity to hire them.

Why am I telling this? The reason is simple and connected with the idea of life-long learning. No matter what you want to achieve in your life, you need the skill of making yourself a hero. If you do not know how to become and be a hero, just start registering how other people do it - and then copy what they do.

Another thing you need to know about hiring men for your building project in Finland is that one day nothing happens on the site. They do not come. Neither do they answer the phone. Then all of a sudden the work starts again without any explanations. You smell the old alcohol and feel relieved, because you hired heroes and you want to keep them. What you need to know is that heroes never get tired. They cannot take a normal holiday because of tiredness, but they can go for a drunken spree for a couple of weeks. Heroes have their faults, but they have no signs of weakness.

In the old days, long before the climatic changes, Finnish people more or less slept through the winter. The pace of life slowed down. Because of all online global contacts we cannot afford that any more. We just go on. This reminds me of our traditional all-the-year-round activities and of a true story that took place in Lapland.

Somebody coming from the south of Finland asked a Saame man in Lapland what activities these poor people have there, so isolated and so far up north. The man answered: "In summer we fish and make love. In winter we do not fish."

That is the normal life we would be leading here, if there were no railway and airplane timetables. In summer 1959 my father built the road to Utsjoki, the northernmost commune of Finland. The name of his bulldozer traxvator was Caterpillar 955. That is how and when the postal bus with its regular time table arrived in Utsjoki making use of diligent, hardworking people. Maybe it would, in the long run, be more valuable to turn back to the basics and not fish that much.

You might like to see what Utsjoki looks like - without any time tables.