Why This Blog?

It’s All About The Art Of Sharing.

Actually, it was my son, a very bright young man who lacks all my unnecessary modesty, who suggested that I should start publishing a blog: ”Man, you’re a professional writer and a pretty creative person. Why don’t you use even more your tool that the years and decades have sharpened? Your sold professional stuff will most likely never make you famous.”

Well, I am not after fame with this blog, either. I am reasonably satisfied if some of my friends occasionally read my lines and share my thoughts. And – who knows? – maybe I will make new friends or get new readers, as well. Most people write for themselves; even many of them who get published in one way or another. For me the best kind of scribbling resembles meditation: the only company is yourself and your stream of consciousness, your dreams, memories, aspirations and what have you. Sometimes the therapeutic effect is equally positive. I write; therefore I am.

However, the most important motive for this blog is the idea of sharing with the capital S. I think sharing is one of the keys to human happiness. This is a very widely-proven fact by many traditions, from incalculable schools of psychology to Buddhism and other similar well-proven traditions. In my case I did not always know how to share, neither did I see the importance of it. I learned it quite precisely 40 years ago, on a different continent, in a quite dull American suburb. That personal learning process is told in my musing reminiscence below:

Far away there is a captivating city about which you once said only there the people are crazy enough to paint a bridge red. From that city a message came to me breaking the news that you had passed away just a few days ago. In case you can now monitor my innermost thoughts, you might be surpised to learn that someone as distant and non-visible in your later decades can feel such a staggering loss deep down in his heart as I did.

You had cancer already in the mid-seventies when we met in your kitchen in a mind-numbing New Jersey suburbia that made one long for the once beautiful farmland it was build on. A kind of place I did not feel exactly at home at that time – yet the very reason we sat together in the first place. I liked to hurry after school from our blue house at Fairfield Drive a few yards to your cream-colored house, boringly identical with the rest, passing your cream-colored Audi on the driveway while making a short-cut to your kitchen door, smelling the cake and tea, expecting our session.

In the modern sense you were not in such a great shape, as our encounters took place a long time before a generation of American housewifes and career women rushed into gyms wearing figure-hugging apparel in a Jane Fonda style. No, you were a solid counseling lady with a degree in Psychology wearing checkered slacks and a pastel colored turtle-necks, pearls too. Such an engaging individual you were, not a mother projection, but rather a challenging partner in many deep-probing conversations.

Each time you made a point I remember voluntarily immersing myself into your dark, wet, twinkling eyes and witnessing how your mouth, surrounded by gracious wrinkles of maturity, did the convincing talk. Your main advice for a puzzled, introverted teenager in the midst of life’s first let-downs, was a trick you called by a verb I can still recall: “Share your time, your thoughts, your feelings ­– share your life with those around you ­– and discover the love that is there to be shared.”

So through this great simple idea of sharing I am also lovingly commemorating a soul I knew a long time ago.

The writings in my blog will be published in English, Swedish and Finnish. Usually, in the language they were originally written. All comments are welcome.