Suomen Soliloquies

Read to the end and the title will make sense. I promise :) The author Amy Krouse Rosenthal earlier this year at the age of 51 due to cancer. I had never heard of Amy until about two weeks before she died yet I felt a tremendous sadness at her passing. From what I’ve heard of her though, she was a woman who made the world a little brighter. It turns out that Amy was a children’s author, which is what surprises me because I spent the past two years swallowing all children’s books I could lay my hands on. Somehow none of her books ever crossed my path. I heard about her because of an essay she wrote for the New York Times in which she wrote an imaginary dating profile for her husband, who was going to have to keep living once she passed away. Amy’s love and tenderness poured out from every word on the page. Despite the cancer and medication that were both eating away at her ability to form coherent sentences, she wrote with a poignancy I can only hope for in my own writing....

Frozen sand on the lake in Muurola My favorite passage in the Bhagwad Gita Chapter 2, verses 62-63. In these verses, the Lord Krishna explains how attachment causes desire, which leads to anger, then confusion, then weakness of memory and intellect and eventual ruin. I try to remind myself of this passage as often as I can, but, as human nature would have it, I often forget and cave to attachments anyway. Fortunately, fate, the Universe, God—take your pick—has a way of intervening when this happens. Take my most recent reminder that came through a friend. Despite the frustration I was causing him, he patiently explained the reality - a reality I was so adamantly denying because it did not fit into the outcome I wanted. His words stopped the attachment that I had begun to form to an unlikely outcome. Ever since coming to Finland, I have been trying to take things as they come. I try to not think about whether things will work out or not and focus on just completing the ...

A view from under the bridge in Turku The past few days have been rather snowy in Turku. The roads are covered in a packed layer of snow, with ice patches camouflaged under the white. While walking to class today, I saw a guy descending from the hill to the footpath under the bridge. He took a step onto the sidewalk and jolted back with his arms flailing out. This all occurred in the matter of seconds. He quickly regained his balance and kept walking as though nothing had happened. I’ve seen so many people nearly slip, the same way this young man did. Most casually keep walking, sometimes they share a laugh with their companions if they are walking with others. A few actually fall to the ground, get back up, and continue on. I’ve done both on many occasions. But today it struck me that this sight is very endearing. The word cute also came to mind to describe it. And then I realized how terrible both thoughts sounded, even in my head. I had to reflect about it ...