today was ...

1:  ... joy and contentment

There’s no doubt that the last four weeks have been an amazing time in my life. I mean, I haven’t done anything really spectacular (apart from lying on a bed of nails, which was very cool), but I have begun to recover two things that I’d lost.

The first is my liking for Finland. I really enjoyed it here when I first visited four-and-a-half years ago, but I kinda fell out of love with it during successive visits. This time around, though, I’ve found myself marching in the “I love Finland” parade once again, waving my little blue-and-white flag and my stuffed moomin* around like ... well, like a mad Finn, basically.

This place truly is a tonic for the soul.

The thing is, it’s exactly the same country I left a year ago, so I can only conclude that it’s my mindset which has changed. The vast open spaces, the dramatic skies, the clean air and the profound quiet all do their part to clear my mind and put me in a good mood – whereas last year I just found the whole place kinda boring.

As a nice little bonus, the strange hobbity language, with its wonderfully long compound words and crazy umlauty vowel sounds, is really grabbing me this time … perhaps because my contact with Estonian last year has rendered at least a few Finnish words understandable**.

Anyway, today I got a large dose of southern Finland at its green, idyllic best, and out there in the middle of nowhere with not a soul around, I found myself rather blissed out. There were moments when I felt infused with a zen-like calm, and others when I wanted to yell “Woo-hoooo!” across the empty fields. Both were fun )))

2: ... a bitter farewell

The other thing I’d partially lost during my nine months in Lviv was my passion for teaching English. Of course teaching has the same ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ as any profession, and for various reasons which I won’t bore you with, the nine months from October last year to June this year was probably the biggest downer I’ve had (only in the professional sense) since I started doing this weirdarse job.

When I came to Finland, I think there was a shiny little neuron of hope lurking somewhere in the back of my brain, boldly claiming that coming here might help me to recover some of the ‘fire’ that I’d lost.

And, amazingly, that’s exactly what happened.

Being in Finland (see above) was certainly part of the reason for this. Hanging out with my colleagues Andrea, Chelsea and Jonny helped as well, ‘cause the four of us had loads of fun and helped each other cope with the stresses and absurdities of summer camp. But the dominant influence was the busloads of Russian teenagers with whom I’ve basically lived for the last four weeks.

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while are familiar with my rants about the most surprising/miraculous aspect of teaching English: namely the number of great and inspiring people you meet, especially amongst the younger folk. When you see how brilliantly some of your young students can shine – not just academically, but in plenty of other ways too – it’s hard to remain cynical and unaffected.

This year my summer job brought me two miracles in human form: sisters from Moscow, Liza and Sonja, who blew me away on more or less a daily basis. They were not only gifted students, but also great humans with impressive creative abilities. On top of that, their classmates (the “Yummy All-stars”) were also pretty damn cool, and every morning I woke up looking forward to seeing them and ‘working’ with them.

Maybe the greatest thing about all of this, btw, is that I felt the need to put rabbit ears around the word 'working' in that previous paragraph. I just read it back to myself, noticed the ears (which I'd typed without really thinking about it) and thought "Hey ... cool!" I mean, surely this is the kind of thing everyone hopes for in their professional life: a job which you scarcely think of as work at all, but more as something which you simply do because it's part of who you are.

"But wait", you may or may not be thinking. "Why is all this cheerful rambling under such a dark heading?"

Well, there's sort of a catch. See, the weird meta-reality of summer camp can only be sustained for a short period before it collapses on itself, like a probability wave when you open the box and the cat either a) leaps out and asks for food or b) lies still and decomposes. At the end of it all, there comes the point where everyone has to say “goodbye” (often through a flood of tears), get on a bus and go home. And that’s the last time you ever see 98% of them.

Today was the final day of camp at Anjalankoski. After breakfast all the students piled their bags into the luggage hold of their coach, and I spent my final hour with Liza and Sonja. It was every bit as sad and depressing as I’d anticipated.

The goodbyes never get easier (((

3: … a mad mission

Dull-but-necessary contextual stuff: after the month-long stint at Anjalankoski, I’d signed on with the same employer for another summer camp in a place called Valkeala***. The two places are about 55km distant from each other, with a reasonable-sized city called Kouvola lying in between.

My school had offered me a lift to Valkeala, which would take about 3/4 of an hour. But I decided that it would be more fun to make my own way there. (Plus I wanted the exercise – gonna see My Beloved in two weeks, and I want to look as good as possible when the day arrrives.)

The resulting plan: go to the bike shop in Anjalankoski, ask if I could take the bike I’d been renting from them on an ‘extended excursion’, then get the train to Kouvola and cycle the remaining 30kms to Valkeala.

I arranged all of that a couple of days ago, and it seemed like everything would be ok. However, Finland’s weather has been unusually wild lately, with heatwaves, storms, fires, and even tornadoes occasionally destroying forests and knocking out power lines for days at a time.

So … when I went into school today, I heard the dire forecasts: “There’s going to be a really big thunderstorm this afternoon. Stay indoors – it’s gonna be nasty out there.”

“Hmmm”, thinks Anthony. “To ride or not to ride?”

At 2:30pm, when the time came to make the final decision, the winds were gusting angrily and the skies were apocalyptically dark. I realised that the only sensible course of action would be to return my bike and accept the lift that my school had offered me.

Then I realised something else: that was never going to happen.

I cycled out of Kouvola an hour later, without a map. (I'd printed out a set of written instructions from Google, like “Take Valkealayannta for 3.4kms then left into the Kalevantie for 11.6kms.")

As I reached the outskirts of the city, heavy rain drops were darkening my shirt and bouncing off my head, while the wind pushed me around like a playground bully, and the skies rumbled with malicious intent. I braced myself for a difficult, possibly even terrifying ride – I mean, what was I going to do if the weather got really intense, and I was dodging lightning bolts in Nowheresville with not a soul around to help me?

Fortunately I didn't have to find out; after the first hour or so of riding through rain, the skies cleared and the usual sunny, perfect tranquility of Finland re-appeared. Yay!

Two and a half hours later I arrived at the new college, somewhat exhausted but feeling great after the ride. The landscape out here is stunningly spacious and pretty, especially after you leave the main highways and get onto the almost-deserted country roads – and it was this that produced the ‘magic moments’ I mentioned earlier.

Of course, the Russian camp administrators at both ends of the journey thought I was insane. But that’s fine … I’m more or less used to being a ‘weird foreigner’, and most of what I do/say/think seems odd to the people around. It often used to happen in my own country, anyway ... at least here, I have an excuse for being weird ;-)

… a day of resolutions

Cycling through the wide open spaces of Finland gave me a lot of time to think today. At some point, I realised that a few things had been simmering slowly in the back of my head, and that they'd formed themselves into more or less clear thoughts during the journey.

(Isn't it great how journeys do that?)

Actually, a few of these things were more than just thoughts: they were resolutions. So, at the risk of sending everyone to sleep, I'm going to share three of these with you now. Please don't feel that I'm 'preaching' here – these resolutions are just for me. Having said that, I'd be interested to hear your opinion about them. Let me know if you think they're reasonable or not.

Ok, here we go ...

Resolution #1: never, ever grow up
(a.k.a. "be a teenager forever")

Working with young people teaches you this: being an 'adult' is ridiculous. When you're in summer camp, you watch and listen to young people all day long (and sometimes all night), you find ways of relating to them, you see them on their best and worst behaviour, and sometimes at their most creative. In a way, you almost get to be a kid for a little while, doing silly 'kid/teenaged things' like riding your bike into town for ice cream after school, trying out new table tennis moves or making a home movie with your friends. And guess what? It's a great life.

This is something that I never want to lose sight of as adult life tries to bury me (and everyone else) beneath a mountain of responsibilities. So ... here's what I reck'n:

Rather than letting the sensible adult world mould us into boring people, and leaving kidhood behind, we should be aiming to do the absolute minimum possible amount of adult stuff necessary to keep us from becoming homeless. And we should do it in the knowledge that a) it's mostly bullshit, and b) it's trying to kill us inside. Look at it as merely an unavoidable distraction from the real mission ... which, btw, is to be incredibly silly, run about laughing, eat ice cream, play racquet sports and do whatever stuff we happen to think is fun/cool.

That's all )))


Resolution #2: Never have a normal life

Sometimes when I hear others say things like "People think I'm crazy", it sounds like a pretentious boast. So I hesitate a little to make a similar claim about myself. However, it really seems to be true. And y'know, I've gradually reached the conclusion that this is a very, very good thing. 

The why of it goes like this: if people doubt your sanity, it's because you do or say things which lie outside the range of what they think a sane person might decide to do or say. By implication, the people who think this about you define themselves as sane and normal. Over the years I've noticed something about these 'normal' people: namely, that they don't appear to be having anywhere near as much fun as I am.

Logically, therefore, it follows that when people think you're crazy, the only sensible reaction is to feel sorry for those people. They're clearly not enjoying their lives to the fullest ... such a shame that they're too frikkin' scared, unimaginative or just plain dull to leap onto the crazy float with you and join the parade ;-)


Resolution #3: Be where the people aren't

My last resolution for the day was simply this: sometimes the only way to deal with the fact that you share your world with other people is to get as far away from them as you possibly can.

I find it extremely interesting that, on the one hand, solitary confinement causes many people who experience it to go insane, whereas just the solitude without the confinement is actually sanity-enhancing. (At least it is for me ... and I don't think I'm alone here.****)

Certainly I've found that's one of the best things about Finland: there's enough space here for everyone to be truly alone any time they want to. The open fields, empty roads, gently winding rivers etc. don't photograph as well as, say, craggy fjords and dramatic mountainscapes, but they have a real therapeutic effect ... as though you've just spring cleaned your brain and now you can finally relax in it.

Maybe the feeling of spaciousness is a function of the number of saunas here – altogether there are two million, for a population of five million people. Could be that most of the people you'd otherwise be sharing your environs with are underground and therefore out of sight.

(In Helsinki, a tour guide once pointed out to me that there's one sauna for every 2.5 people in Finland, which means that, in theory, every Finn could be having a sauna at the same time. She then explained that this is exactly the moment the Russians are waiting for ;-)


But whatever the reason, the availability of solitude is a marvellous thing, and today I resolved to look for opportunities to "be where the people aren't" on a regular basis. I mean, I think this is something I tend to do anyway, but from now on, it's no longer optional. It must happen ... 'cause it keeps me sane )))

And that was today. Hope you enjoyed it :-)

Bye!

Anthony.


P.S. Thanks to Yuliya and to Anna Ternheim for inspiring the title (and hence the whole format) of this little ramble.


* A cartoon character that's one of the symbols of Finland. He looks kinda like a little hippo. In two of the photos here you can almost see moomin on my t-shirt, which my students bought for me.

** The two languages, Finnish and Estonian, are ‘cousins’, with lots of similarities in lexis, grammar etc.

*** Valkeala: a great-sounding name, no? At least I thought so. Sadly it kinda loses something in translation: roughly translated, it means "the hole".

**** Sorry for the terrible pun. You can slap me for it the next time you see me.