Take a deep breath everyone. It's almost the weekend. Growing up, one of my favorite stories was from William Bennet's Book of Virtues. I'm sure you've heard a version of this story before, but here's a quick rundown: A young boy is given a ball of golden thread. It represents the time of his life. The thread is always unraveling slowly, but once given control, the boy can pull out more thread to make time pass more quickly. He is sitting in school one day and is very tired of his teacher always bothering him, so he pulls the thread. He doesn't want to have to go through all the years of school before beginning his profession, so he pulls out more thread. He meets a woman that he loves but doesn't look forward to the long courtship necessary to marriage, so he pulls out more thread. At the end of his life he realizes that in skipping all the difficult and exhausting times of his life, his life lost meaning and value.
There are a lot of times in life when you just have to suck it up and get the job done. And really, there are very few times that you can identify as being completely free of worry and difficulty. In the end, life isn't moments of happiness and bliss that are loosely strung together. Life is in the details. Relationships are beautiful in the compromises and successions. Paychecks are awesome in the the perseverance they required. Struggle provides meaning.
"I should like to live me life again as if for the first time, but without your magic ball. Then I will experience the bad things as well as the good without cutting them short, and at least my life will not pass as swiftly and meaninglessly as a daydream."
-William Bennet
Now, on with the show. Miika, feel free to take whatever themes you'd like! And I'd love to hear more about how your education works. Also, did you grow up speaking English and Finnish, or is it more like Ireland where they speak English mostly? I met a couple who were from Sweden when I was on a safari in Tanzania a couple years ago and they had very different levels of English proficiency, so please enlighten me!
1. What is your favorite word?
Ruminate
2. What is your least favorite word?
affect/effect. they're close enough that we should just have one
3. What turns you on?
intelligence
4. What turns you off?
close-mindedness
5. What sound do you love?
wind chimes
6. What sound do you hate?
any kind of alarm or buzzer
7. What is your favorite curse word?
probably the f-word. but it's usually whispered or yelled when I'm talking to myself
8. What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
Astronaut. But I'd settle for travel guide writer/researcher
9. What profession would you not like to do?
Anything medical-related
10. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?
Come in, take a load off, you're home now.
Happy Thursday,
Elise
Explaining the whole education here might take a while and I'm not going to do it now unless if you want to but I can tel you that I grew up speaking Finnish until the age of nine when we had our first English lessons at school. Finns living on the eastern border grow up speaking Finnish and Russian and Finns living in west coast grow up with Finnish and Swedish. There lives a lot of Finnish Swedes which might explain it.
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