Life. Living. The meaning of life. Elämä on Laiffii.
I don’t think one can make a move with their family to another country mid-way through life without having at least a relatively deep sense of what one wants from life or holds important in their lives. Multiculturalism has to be a value to do that.
For many, comfort is familiarity; knowing where everything is when they wake up in the morning and finding that it’s all still there, just the way it was when they went to bed, and it’ll all be there again tomorrow.
I get that. I’ve thought about that kind life a lot in my 45 conscious years of living, because let’s face it, 3-year-olds don’t contemplate that stuff. In fact, it’s probably more like 30 years of reflection because you probably don’t truly start sensing who you are and how you’re are different until you’re at least 8 to 10 years old. I started sensing in myself that I was an inquisitive wanderer at a pretty young age. I am most comfortable when I’m exploring. I’ve always been interested in how people in other places lived.
My life on the Iron Range of Minnesota began to feel very cramped to me already by middle school. I didn’t even really know why I was doing it at the time, but I started testing social norms, pushing some relatively safe boundaries by about 8th grade. By that time, a lot kids around me were pushing them with booze, cheap drugs, huffing gasoline at noon hour. The usual stuff. The self-destructive behavior that rust belt towns in the ‘80s with heavy mine layoffs might present to kids rebelling or at least finding a pathway to deal with whatever it was they were dealing with, even if it was just peer pressure for some; more heavy stuff for others.
I had no reason to self-destruct, and thank goodness for it. Another life question we likely all ponder is why we are the kids of our parents? On that one, I hit the jackpot. Any testing I was doing, I did pretty well within the confines of good-kid stuff, and I have my parents and dumb luck being born to them to thank for it. I rarely betrayed their trust…not never, but rarely. And when I did, it was rarely…not always, likely within the laws of the land. So when I chose to dress like Sonny Crocket for the first day of school in 8th grade at Martin Hughes Middle School and persist with that kind of get up, it wasn't a dangerous kind of rebellion. I’m not sure I knew what I was testing nor if I really knew I was testing anything at all, but when I really dig, I think I had to know that coming in looking more like a Pet Shop Boy than an acid-washed Angus Young, I was in fact testing. I was checking social boundaries, the strength and depth of friendships.
I got my answer. As strong as I’d like to think I was in my convictions, it wasn’t long before I reverted back to jeans and T-shirts to fit back in, but the die was cast. I didn’t revert because I wanted to. I did it to survive. I learned what changing your imagery does in a culture with rigid gender roles, and I would love to say today that I didn’t cave, but I did. But I also learned then and there—and no offense to anyone who did otherwise—I needed to explore far beyond where I was. There wasn’t enough physical or social room there to fill my cup with what I wanted to experience.
We weren’t ever poor, but we were always a family of lower means who carried ourselves with as much dignity as we could and could stretch a dollar to look like two. I knew that young I was going to fly when I could, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it. With Giants Ridge nearby and my ski racing getting better and better at the nationally-competitive level, I remember we went on a family camping trip out east and humored then-coach and friend, Muffy Ritz, on a tour of Green Mountain Valley School in Waitsfield, Vermont. Muffy was so awesome and I dreamed what it would be like living in the dorms, training, maybe getting a ride with her in her pink Saab. I think we even stopped in Lake Placid to look at Mountain House too, which is now the National Sports Academy. That was the first time I met John Farra, who was going there. Oh, man, how I wanted to go to one of them. It seemed so cool. But, it wasn’t going to happen. I knew it was on me to be able to get out into the world.
Long story short, I found my path. It was obviously ski racing. Early on I fundraised to get to bigger national events. I owe a lot of people a debt of gratitude who wrote lots of small checks and a few big ones, for a stretch of years. They really opened critical doors for me and I think about that often.
Then I joined the National Guard and made the national team. I truly thought I was driven to be a great athlete and was going to be one. I had a bout of overtraining and learned from it but ultimately got to the world stage. By my mid-20s, reality set in. I was a good athlete, not a great one. The stress to be a great one in a good one’s body started to take its emotional toll by the late 1990s. What made it so hard for me at that time is I had high ideals. I knew resources were limited. I weighed my future continuing as a run-o-the-mill world cup biathlete—what I was doing and where I fit. I realized the buzz of the world cup for those few years I got to be there was almost worth the humiliation of how I was doing in them. What I knew I’d miss the most and what I might hang onto too long, was the travel and seeing the world. And that wasn’t the right reason to keep going. I quit at 26 after missing the Nagano Olympic Team, and went back to finish college.
That’s a long run up to moving with my family to my wife’s home country of Finland at 48 years old with two kids. But I think it is the foundation of how we got here, and how I might share how it feels to live here. I had this kind of wanderlust all my life, along with fascination of culture and cultural differences. This almost felt destined to happen.
First, as romantic as it might appear to some, I don’t think something like this is for everyone. It isn’t for those who like having things where they know they’re going to be. That’s essential to the topic. The uncertainty can be paralyzing at times. I realize I am far from the most mobile of world-travelers, but we are pretty comfortable as a family unit moving around the world together. I think that international comfort we have and our ability to travel without absolutely ripping each other’s heads off at any single stressful moment, is one of the prerequisites that gets us through it.
Secondly, the timing and circumstances had to be pristine. In recent years, we’ve combined capitalizing on opportunities with doing the right things financially to get to a point where we could at least TRY to pull it off. The pandemic and its effects on all our lives, including my own health conditions, factored into it in a big way too. But it’s super hard, even in a pandemic where people are distanced, to be away from the sports program you’re coaching and trying to build with your partners back home, even when all signs are there and the third base coach is waving you home, which we feel was the case in this instance. Not to mention, life without a mask on all the time has been dreamy, though that may be ending.
We’re hear now, and we’re living. The kids get up and go to school. I usually bike with them and they’ll often just ride home themselves or I’ll go meet them by bike, or car on days like today when it’s nasty outside. Mimmu is applying for jobs. I try to ride mountain bike and explore the area most mornings for a bit. I have the odd 3:00 am zoom meeting every few days in our coat closet with my coaching staff and team, and WhatsApp gets busy after about 6pm for me, but other than that, I spend my days continuing to work, eight hours ahead of everyone else. Recruiting. Covering logistics. I still don’t know what my winter is going to look like and can’t glean much from the FIS or IBU sites that gives me any clearer picture either. I plan to be the first one back for spring track season while they stay back to finish school.
I am clearly interpreting though, and the writing done for this blog—besides dusting off a skill I’d left pretty dormant for years—is compelling me to flesh some things out about what our environment means to our daily living.
Language is a big one for me and the kids. The kids are doing GREAT! Me, not so much.
Finland is an easy place to get along in English without speaking a lick of Finnish. I’m a site better than not-a-lick-of, but I’m still a long way from even asking directions in Finnish then actually using the response I get back in any logical manner. So that’s the tough part. You get the question out in a way that they even think a response in Finnish is warranted (victory!) and the response is so legit that you have no idea what to do (defeat…), so it’s either don’t figure out what you need to know, or revert to ”ei puhu Suomea,” which is even worse, because you just pulled off a question posed well enough IN FINNISH to infer that I wanted an answer IN FINNISH. Then, I get the answer, and I’m all, well, I don’t ACTUALLY speak Finnish. I’m just pretending I do… Idiot! In my own defense, I bought coffee and a pulla, at Mestarin Herkku Keittiö a couple days ago. I ordered, paid, and got change, without Mimmu there, all in Finnish. So there. Finnish is wicked hard too, by the way.
The only driving thing I have trouble with is no right turn on red. Done that a few times. Also, and this isn’t hard for me to remember because I like biking and bikers, walkers--pedestrians in general. You have to stop at all cross walks. It’s a €1,000 (about $1300) fine to move into a crosswalk with your vehicle if any pedestrian user is in the crosswalk. Money talks, bitches! I love it!
It’s hard to get into how it feels by comparison to live here and at home, without it getting political, but I’m going to try.
I’ll start with saying Finns are VERY political, but not at all in the way we currently are in the United States. I think they are political in the way we wish we could find our way back to, but earnestly, I don’t know that the US has EVER been political in the way Finland is political in a good way. Finns are civically-mindedly political—the best kind.
First, the news is news. That’s the clearest difference I feel daily here. We get world news and we get Finnish news. If you want the nasty noise we get, you can subscribe to cable and get it, but once you’ve been here more than a week, why you’d want it, and worse, pay extra for it, would present itself as the absurdity it is if you are even remotely a reflective person. This element of Finnish life alone lowers my blood pressure and calms me down.
When news is news, real and relevant issues and viewpoints reach the political arena. Finland has multiple parties, all represented in their government. In fact, 9 parties are represented in Finnish Parliament, with the bulk of the political agendas being driven by 6—count them—6!—different parties. Talk about coalition-building! The general spectrum of the whole system can accurately be characterized as generally left of where we are in the United States, maybe way left, as the Finnish focus on welfare has been a constant of its 103 year history. Finland has a Lutheran state church, but it doesn’t figure into politics really at all, and most Finns might look at you quizzically why it would, if you asked if it did. Global business folks are more likely to lament how business is done here as corporate tax shelter isn't a big motive, but on the flip side, the homeless are almost non-existent, things are clean, people have stuff and money to buy it. You can also get a mortgage at 1.2%(!). Banks can’t profit hugely on your housing needs, I guess.
The most obvious thing to me is how nice everything is and how—happy, wouldn’t be the right word--maybe “not-scared” is a better descriptor of how it feels here. The corona virus has people scared for sure, but still, it’s all relative, because they ALL have health care guaranteed. Imagine how that might change the way people felt right now in the US, especially those who just lost their jobs. So, we’re really getting a true sense of what it’s like here, and it feels less scared I think. There is plenty less to be scared of for real.
Everyone has lots of vacation here. If you work, you probably have a nice place to live and a car or choose to use public transportation, which is clean, safe, convenient, and nice. If you are college educated, you probably have a very nice place to live and a very nice life. And if you live here, regardless of your education and background, you have time to relax and enjoy yourself and know that if you break your arm while enjoying yourself, your life isn’t going to change at all besides a doctor is going to see you and have a cast put on it, and you go back to living.
I think that is an underlying difference of how it feels to live here. People aren’t scared. They have a government that represents them, and when the government shuts them down to contain the corona virus, everyone pretty much goes along with it. And here’s how that looks:
Population USA: 300,062,311
Population Minnesota: 5,680,000
Population Finland: 5,540,720
Overall Corona cases since the start.
USA Total cases: 6,350,000
Minnesota total cases: 81,666
Finland total cases: 8,411
Overall Corona Deaths
USA: 190,000
Minnesota 1,194
Finland 336
If Finland had same rates of Corona infection and death as USA and Minnesota
Cases Finland v USA/MN
Finland if same rate as USA: 106,294
Finland if same rate as MN: 81,666
Finland actual: 8,411
Deaths Finland v USA/MN
Finland if same rate as USA: 3,180
Finland if same rate as MN: 1,164
Finland actual: 336
New Corona Cases August 24-September 6
Minnesota: 6,728
Finland: 371
The news is all about the trend of 371 cases since August 24th. We can feel the plan in the pipeline coming our way in the news every night. This trend is a big deal here--the biggest--as it should be. But just let the scale sink in a second, and how can you not love Finland at least just a little? I feel more informed and protected about the cases since late August than any effort at home, and it’s 6,300 fewer than Minnesota in that same stretch of time. Nobody is blaming anybody else, or saying they can't buckle down if it comes to that again, and the leaders of the country are doing their jobs. They are leading Finland based on information from epidemiologists and the statistical trends.
If you just look around when you live here, you see a very productive society of people. You don’t see lazy takers of rich people’s money through taxes, though no doubt there are those who feel that way in Finland, but those folks also feel pretty safe. I haven’t seen a home security system in Finland yet, except at the president’s residence in Helsinki.
If you come from the US, even Duluth where it’s pretty safe and a great place to live, things are new by comparison. They are cleaner. They are built better. You have to wonder how they do it? It’s pleasant here. People look like they’re going to work, not rushing to work or bleeding for their work. They aren’t spending 60+ hours a week at work, and more importantly, nobody is suggesting they do that. People live well here.
To be fair to America's realities, Finland doesn’t own an aircraft carrier. They've spent no money on nuclear weaponry. They’ve not been asked to contain any country’s nuclear threat. They are not expected to come to any other country’s aid, though they do contribute to international initiatives. They have Russia bearing down on them from the east and always have, so it’s not like they have no strategic military threat nor infrastructure to try to effectively deal with it. They do.
What stands out when you live here is that life is really good. Whatever got Finland to where it is today, it has largely worked for its people. Crime is low. People feel safe, even if they feel less safe than they did before Corona, it feels safer here. The numbers above don’t lie, but they don’t just occur either. They come from a society that is functioning to care for its people, and the people implicitly trust that.
It’s hard to come to a realization that something you love dearly isn’t necessarily what it’s largely believed to be, and I’m talking about my country here. I have worn my country’s armed forces uniform and I’ve worn her acronym across my back in foreign competitions. Yelling the loudest that you are the best, doesn’t make you the best. I never won a ski race by telling others I did. And the act of yelling about what your country is or isn't doesn’t make you a patriot. If you aren’t interested whether or not what you’re yelling is the case, then the myth stays where it is and nothing ever changes. But I’d argue, if you see the difference and say nothing of it, you’re no patriot at all.