Lone Wolves

Since moving to Finland, one thing my Finnish husband has told me repeatedly is Not To Get Involved. It turns out that Not Getting Involved is a characteristic distinctive of Finns.

Finns don’t actively communicate with strangers on the bus, on the street, or waiting in line beside them. Finns don’t ask personal or searching questions of people who aren’t close friends. If a Finns sees someone asleep on top of a wall or wearing a bathrobe in the Helsinki city centre, they don't pursue the matter. They go about their business quietly, keeping themselves to themselves. They live and let live.

Australians (myself included) are decidedly opposite in nature.

When I am visiting my hometown, I’m always struck by how relentlessly talkative and friendly Australians are – in stores, on public transport, at the supermarket checkout – wherever I turn someone is cheerfully engaging me in conversation. In Finland, without ruthless self-editing I come across as over-effusive and a chatterbox. Even friends often look a bit taken aback when I’m talking to them. I sometimes see actual fright in people’s eyes when I’m enthusiastically explaining something, gesticulating with wild abandon.

It’s more than just wanting to talk, though. I want to HELP. If I see someone on the street holding a map and looking lost, I feel compelled to ask if they need directions. If we’re at the park, I’ll quietly keep an eye on that kid who’s wandered away from his mum, and stop him from eating snow/mud/his own snot. One summer’s day we were playing on the beach, and suddenly a woman nearby started yelling, saying that she couldn’t find her two year old son. I felt her horror so keenly that I almost rushed into the water myself to start the rescue effort (I would have, actually, except that my Finnish husband implored me Not To Get Involved). Eventually little Simo was spotted playing happily in the sand further down the beach, oblivious to all the fuss. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that if this was Australia there would have been half a dozen dads already in the water searching for Simo, while their wives gave his mum hugs and moral support and big brothers and sisters scoured the beach, shouting his name. All that fuss would somehow have felt comforting.

Aussies really are officious enthusiastic participants in other people’s lives. If an old lady slips on the footpath, or a small boy is lost, people rush up to offer assistance and concern. If a group of teenage kids is making trouble in Queen Street Mall, it’s only a matter of time before an older bloke wearing wraparound sunglasses marches up to them and commands them to get their shit together. You could call us busybodies, but really the average Aussie is just a “people person” through and through, and gets immense pleasure and satisfaction from interacting with others. More than that, though, there's a sense of wanting and needing to reach out and make sure others are ok, and a genuine belief that offering someone a kind word and a smile will make a positive difference – even only temporarily.

In Australia, if you see a stranger in trouble, and you ask, “You ok, mate?” what you're really saying is, “I see you’re having a hard time, and I feel for you. I hope you can find your way through it.” You aren’t trying to set yourself up as a new friend, or a guardian angel (let’s face it, you probably won’t even tell that person your name). However, you do connect for a moment - just long enough to give that person a little kick-start towards helping themselves. Just long enough to show them that another human being noticed and felt their pain.

And it truly does make a positive difference - to the person in trouble, yes, but also to you.

Even after two years in Finland, I’m still not sure why Finns are so hesitant to reach out in the same way. I don’t believe they are cold-hearted, lazy, or indifferent (and for the record, if you do initiate conversation with a Finn who is a stranger, their response, though wary at first, will almost always be a positive one). I think it’s mostly about uncertainty – not being quite sure what to say, not wanting to take the liberty of anticipating someone else’s needs, and not wanting to be seen as officious, interfering, or a know-all. These sentiments are fair enough. My best guess at a Finn’s thought process is: “This person has their own family and friends; if they want to talk to someone, they will talk to those people; if they need help, they will seek it from those people. There is no place for me in this person’s life, so it is appropriate that I do not interact with this person.”

All the same, as a nation, Australians come across as reasonably happy and smiley and cheerful, whereas Finns are seen (even by their own) as solemn, melancholy, and even somewhat depressed.

Finns often seem to me like lone wolves, stoic in the face of hardship and terrible weather, reluctant to burden others with their troubles, hesitant to reach out even when another person’s suffering hits them right in the heart.

Poor little lone wolves. I want to help you not to be so alone.

The Prodigal Sun

Part 1: Tuesday

Today, for no good reason, I’m feeling brittle and fragile and on-the-edge. I am full of rage and disappointment at no one and everyone, nothing and everything. It is early afternoon, and in an hour I have to go and pick up my kids. I should be doing my Finnish homework, but instead I am sitting in a café, looking out despondently at the falling snow. I don’t know quite why, but I’m just about at the end of my rope.

I started the day tired, after a bad night’s sleep.

(Little Sister is discovering dreams, and currently wakes up multiple times per night shrieking my name, exclaiming loudly about what she just saw, firmly believing that it was all true.

[sitting up in bed and sobbing with wild abandon] “Mummy’s not THEEEERE! She’s gone! Mummy’s GOOOONE!”

[sitting up in bed and yelling at high volume] “Someone BROKE MY SUNGLASSES! On purpose! They are brooookeeeen!”

[sitting up in bed in an indignant huff] “The new cow is called SNUNNY! That’s his name, silly. Hmph!”)

Then, for some reason (no doubt related to her own broken sleep) Little Sister decided this morning that she was going to opt out of day-care. Her initial efforts to implement this decision (engaging in fake coughing during breakfast, refusing to have clothes put on her, and calmly informing me of her Day-Care Embargo during the bus ride into town) failed, but Little Sister is not a quitter. For the entire fifteen-minute walk from Big Sister’s preschool to Little Sister’s day-care, she sat in her stroller and alternately cried and shrieked and shouted about how much she didn’t want to go to day-care, as I slid on the icy footpath and bent my head against the snow pelting stingingly into my eyes, trying to make soothing platitudes issue forth reassuringly from my mouth, but finding their calming effect was negligible because Little Sister could only hear me over the wind and the traffic if I raised my voice to a shout.

I finally got to my Finnish class, and had one of those days where I had to look up more words than I understood, drew a blank at words I knew we’d already studied, and nearly cried when I couldn’t conjugate a type-1 verb in the present passive. This was one of those days I could not summon any energy or patience; could not find any elation in learning a new foreign language one baby step at a time. I just felt overwhelmed and tearful and defeated, and as I walked down the corridor on my way out a couple of shameful big-girl tears dripped down my cheeks.

I opened the street door to find that during the hours I had been inside, the snow had not let up at all, and was now ankle-deep and rising. A sudden sense of blind fury rose in my chest, momentarily overpowering the despair and pissed-offedness already simmering within. Never mind that we’ve had it easy this winter. Only two months of snow so far, and not even that many days of temperatures colder than -15, and yet, I have just had a GUTFUL of the cold and the snow. I am sick of dragging deadweight strollers and sleds laden with children through thick, porridgey snow and over slippery ice; sick of having freezing snowballs thrown excitedly at me; sick of feeling cold despite layers and layers of clothes; sick of reminding my three year old multiple times a day not to reach out of the stroller and swipe at banked-up, dirty, dog-wee-covered snow and put it into her mouth; sick of trying to be a good mother and forcing myself to remain with my kids in the park long after I’ve had enough of standing there in the cold, knowing that no matter how long I remain stoic, the minute I announce that we’re leaving they will still cry and whine because they would stay, revelling delightedly in the snow and ice, for three bloody hours if I let them.

It does no one any good to rage against the weather, but to hell with it.

I am also angry (in no particular order) about the following: the fact that I love ice cream but lately it has inexplicably turned on me and gives me brutal stomach aches; the fact that I can’t manage to get my house key out of my bag and into the lock without taking off my gloves, and thirty seconds without gloves is a hand-freezing eternity when it’s -10; the fact that our building management has decreed that we must not leave anything in the huge, echoing expanse of space corridor outside our apartment door and that therefore our tiny front hallway is now crammed with a stroller, a sled, an enormous plastic box containing the kids’ outside toys, and the whole family’s winter boots dripping dirty puddles of melted snow endlessly onto the floor; the fact that I would love to work as a lawyer again someday – sooner rather than later - but I cannot for the life of me find a way to do that and still be there for my kids, let alone sleep, let alone have some kind of a life outside work and kids; the fact that I have so much to be grateful for and yet today I feel inexplicably low and cranky and cannot manage to shake it off.

Today it is a bad, dark day inside my head. It’s as though someone has turned the lights off and moved the light switch beyond my grasp, and the culprit is hiding somewhere in the darkness, taunting and mocking me in a soft, cruel voice.

Life may be wonderful and beautiful and a gift, but today I’m royally pissed off at it.

 

Part 2: Wednesday

I can’t quite believe the change that came over me this morning, when (noticing that the room was oddly bright) I looked out of the window and saw The Prodigal Sun rising in the sky.

Suddenly, everything was ok again.

It is gorgeously sunny in Helsinki today – clear blue skies, brilliant sunshine that actually feels warm, and temperatures above zero! This is weather we haven’t had for weeks and months, and everyone’s spirits are soaring. The air is full of hope; infused with the heady promise of spring.

It is early afternoon. I have an hour to myself before I have to go and pick up my kids. I should be doing my Finnish homework, but instead I am sitting in a café, defiantly eating ice cream as the sun pours in through the floor-to-ceiling glass window beside me. After months of bitter chill, right now I am toasty warm. I am actually sweating a little bit. It is thrilling in the extreme.

This day and this sun and the sense of hope in the air have literally given me a new lease on life. This time yesterday, I was the same person, sitting in exactly the same café as I am today, and yet today everything is different. Everything is better.

Life is strange like that.  

All you have to do is wait for the sun.