Two Types of Language

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions.

Last week I was talking to an audience about the requirements our present working life sets us. Principally I was saying that intelligence and creativity belong to the basic concepts we need to know and be aware of. This is how questions came to my mind. I wanted to know what happened in the field of questions in the very begining. So I took the Bible and found out.

It is easy for you to check in the Bible that the act of creation does not include any questions, just simple statements. God was as if he were talking to himself. He said this, and he said that, and what he said was exactly what he wanted to exist. I mean that his words did not refer to anything. They were that something.

I find this a bit difficult to explain, because as human beings we always need to refer to something when we express our thoughts. We need to know what kind of social agreements we have on the meanings of all words.

Our words refer to something, but think of God´s words. I have to take an example: if God said a ´dog´ a dog started to exist, to wag the tail, to bark and sniffle; if he said a ´swallow´, a swallow came into existence and started to fly around to catch flies. This also shows how important it was for him to think first and to talk just after that. What would a swallow be, if there were no flies to catch, for instance? There was no room for slipshod words and utterances. What would happen, if he said ´hmmmhhmm´ or ´oh-ohhoh´? He had to be careful, make exact plans, and work systematically. No wonder he felt tired on the seventh day.

It is obvious that God wanted an easier version of life for us than for himself. He knew that he had not given us that much concentration power and systematic thinking abilities. Or maybe he did not trust us much enough from the very beginning. Just think what would happen, if all our words really started to live and go around! All the ´hmmhhmms´ and ´oh-hhohs´. The mistrust becomes understandable, when we remember that God´s idea was that human beings would fill the earth.

It must have been due to that type of risks that human language was created separately. God just told the first human being to name all cattle, the fowl of the air, and every beast in the field and those names are just labels, not the very thing they refer to.

So far we know that in the beginning God did not ask anything. He just ´said´ and ´called´. Later on, when everything was ready and finished he was quietly walking in the garden, obviously enjoying all he had achieved. And there, in the cool of the day, we can hear God utter his first question.

We all know that any process of creation is contradictory. Creativitity helps us to control uncertainty, but simultaneously it generates new elements of uncertainty. It consumes energy and simultaneously it renews our energy resources. It causes feelings of joy and enjoyment, but it also makes us feel depressed and desperate.

It is totally possible that in God´s big project of creation there was no room, nor need or desire to ask anything. But now that everything was finished, the situation had changed. God perhaps looked around. He more or less returned to his normal life and asked his first question: "Where are you Adam?" (= exact translation of the 1992 Finnish version of Bible) "Where art thou?" (King James Version of the English Bible).

As to our present day, when calling anybody, the first question we ask is the very same God´s question: "Where are you?" It is often followed by another question "What are you doing?" as we need to make sure that the other person is able to concentrate on what we are going to tell them and they may be in a meeting or queuing in a supermarket or sunbathing somewhere in the tropic.

It is worth noticing that God did not ask the first human beings What are you doing? He knew that they had not yet any mobile phones. Neither did he want to pretend any more ignorance. He had to admit that he is almighty and he knew that the human beings were hiding and why they were doing so.

In fact, it is totally possible that even God´s Where are you? question was just to show people - and maybe to God himself too - that, if necessay, he was able to ask questions as well. He was not limited to just saying something, calling things into existence and blessing the things he had created.

Mobile phones have made the question Where are you? a normal, reasonable question in our every-day human level communication. Before mobile phones asking Where are you? was more or less limited to playing hide-and-seek with small children. Maybe they amused themselves by playing hide-and-seek in the Garden of Eden before anything bad had happened?

Although those two questions Where are you? and What are you doing? are important questions I was not paid for talking about them to my audience. They are not the basic questions our present working life asks us and wants to hear answers for. What our working life asks all of us is the simple question Who are you?

God never asked the first human beings Who are you? because he knew it better than they would ever be able to know themselves. Our working life asks us Who are you? because it knows that your answer to that simple question determines your answer to the question What are you able to do? as well. If you say ´I am...´ you also reveal ´I can...´and ´I am able to...´and that is what working life is interested in.

It is now Easter time, full moon and everything. Perhaps you remember what happened in Jerusalem more or less two thousand years ago?

God´s son, who spoke the same human type of language we all do, was talking with his friends about the Who are you? topics. He said "and thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. " (Matthew, 16:18)

We know that ´Peter´has contradictory reference in the same way creativity does. It refers to both solid rock and to a fallible and vulnerable human being.

Can you perhaps find some human efforts in life that would not be affected by this double reference?

Don´t you feel somehow unburdened?

Any Space between the Words?

Have you ever thought of the spaces between words? I do not mean the millimeters between written words, but the spaces between the words you say.

If you say something that you know by heart and have repeated several times, those spaces become very difficult to detect. Practically they disappear.

But when you want to construct new ideas, you probably have to scan for words to get your ideas expressed. You need to consciously think what you want to say and compare that to the expressions available in your mind. It may take time and effort to chain the meanings to satisfactorily describe what you want to express.

I have been reading a book about Russian culture lately (Opas venäläisyyteen ISBN:9-789511-209249). The book consists of articles dealing with what is considered to be typical and authentic in the Russian culture.

Spaces between words and concepts came to my mind when I read that by the turn of the 20th century there were two million industrial workers in Russia, but those two million people did not exist in the prevailing social class system of the country. Industrial workers were not included into the four estates.

Anyhow there were two million individual people living the normal life of the industrial workers of that time. I know that their exclusion from the four estates did not apply only to Russia. It is just that I came to think about it when reading that particular book.

The other day the news told that our Finnish employment authorities have trained special officials to guide and help people with high academic education to get satisfactorily established into the present working life system. These people work at the universities or in the public sector. Their income is based on scholarships and short-term project financing which makes their working life status precarious - especially if you want to lead normal life having a family and corresponding economic responsiobilities.

This becomes a matter of spaces between concepts, because those people have no steady jobs with enough security to allow them to apply for credit cards, for example. Neither are they considered to have enough risk to be regarded as self-employed people in the business sector. Not being the former nor the latter, their status is comparable to that of the industrial workers in the late 19th century.

We can think that the main objective of any organization is to produce new knowledge in its field of activity. It does not matter whether you work in the industry or in the public sector, all the time you must think how to make your organisation function better and better. If your company produces tyres like Nokian Tyres, you need to make sure that you are steadily and constantly producing new knowledge in the field of tyres. If you aren´t, your organisation will die.

Public organisations may function a bit more slowly than the market driven business, but the basic rules are the same. Think of hospitals, for instance. Medical expertise combined with engineering expertise has resulted in new knowledge. As patients and their families we seldom think that it is new knowledge. We just see that things in hospitals function better and more quickly.

New knowledge is based on experience. Somebody has said that the walls and files have experiences, but they are unable to share them with anybody. It is our human ability to share and compare experiences that makes us creators of knowledge. Machines do not make new knowledge, neither do rooms nor reports. Human beings do - provided they are able and willing to do so.

If we share experiences with people having similar kind of experiences it becomes difficult to see anything new. There are not enough spaces between the words and concepts. There is not enough hesitation and uncertainty. To be creative we need to face enough diversity and insecurity, but how much is enough? Everybody knows that too much insecurity and uncertainty destroys all creative efforts.

It would be very interesting to see what our world will be like in hundred years´ time. People in the history have been unable to see decisive emerging trends in and besides their normal life. The same applies to us.

Maybe it is just because the present is so tightly squeezed between the past and the future and there is so little space around the words and concepts.