I have often thought that life seems to move in ten-year chapters. The first ten years are our childhood, when so much is formed in us quietly and deeply, long before we understand what is shaping us. The second ten are our teenage years, when we begin reaching for our own identity and trying to…
Tag: Wisdom
Allow
There was a time when I believed life moved in straight lines. If I made careful plans, if I worked hard enough, if I loved well enough, things would unfold as expected. I thought certainty was something you earned. But life, it turns out, has never been interested in our neat expectations. It bends. It…
Learning to Dance in the Rain
Life is a continuous learning experience. One of the questions I most enjoy asking older people is what life lessons they have learned along the way. It is also a question I return to often in my own heart. In Finland, when people talk about shopping, they sometimes jokingly ask each other how much “stuck”…
The Great Unknown
Some years ago now, while getting ready for yet another ordinary day, a breakfast television interview caught my attention. Lisa Marie Presley was speaking about music, her struggle with addiction, and the memories she carried of her father, Elvis Presley. Because Lisa Marie was born around the same time as I was, and my own…
Changing Seasons
The seasons come and the seasons change. Time keeps moving, steady and unrelenting. Life can feel long when we are walking through it, yet deep down we know it is not endless. The last days of summer, of youth, of early strength and lightness, are behind me now. They belong to another chapter, another self,…
Fabric of Life
When you look at the fabric of your life so far, what colours do you see woven through it? Which shades have been the most dominant? What patterns have emerged in the tapestry of your days? If every experience has been a stitch in the intricate fabric of your life, then how have you been…
Light Mind
Being originally from Finland, yet living in Australia, I have often been asked what a Finnish sense of humour is like. If you are Finnish, you would understand immediately just how difficult that is to explain. Customs can be explained. Beliefs can be described. But humour is something far more elusive. It lives between the…
Second Chance
This year, I have found myself in circumstances I would not wish on anyone. Circumstances that have shaken me, humbled me, and brought me to a place of deep reflection. Yet it is often in life’s most painful and unwanted moments that we are forced to stop, to truly look, and to learn what perhaps…
Escape
The tougher life becomes, the more I find myself daydreaming of escape. The dictionary tells me that escape means “to get free from something”, and there are days when that definition feels almost painfully simple. If only getting free were as easy in real life as it is on a computer keyboard. We press the…
Rustic Wisdom
During our last visit to Finland, I had the privilege of staying in my late mother-in-law’s childhood home, in a small village in the Finnish countryside. These days, that ancestral homestead belongs to one of the cousins, Hannu. The moment I stepped across its threshold, it felt as though the whole earth had paused for…
Apples of Gold 