Skip to main content

New Beginnings


Today while I sat in the very comfortable blue chairs that sit in the prized location of our living room, I decided to put on some music. This was despite my better judgement since I was working on reading a rather dense book for one of my PhD classes starting in September and needed full concentration capacity. Having recently acquired Spotify thanks to my bf, I decided to peruse the vast database to find a new playlist to try. I found one called #vainsuomihitit, or “only Finnish hits.” Feeling adventurous, I decided to give it a whirl.



I had never heard any of the songs on the list and, when I listened to them, I knew that they were not songs I would actively choose to listen to. Yet, hearing the words—only a portion of which I could understand—made emotions well up. They reminded me of Finland, where walking down the street I would hear this beautiful language being spoken and see it written all around me.



A typical Aurajoki picture
Now in a Finnish mindset, even looking into my parents’ back yard made me think of the Finnish cottages I have spent so much of the summer in. I imagined the river that is the subject of every cliched picture on my Facebook wall from international students’ posts and felt a longing to walk along it, while cyclists whizzed effortlessly past—the crowds are never so dense as to make this difficult, this is Finland after all— and people sat on the grassy hill along the river enjoying the last days of summer. I missed the quick breeze that began to bite at dusk even in the midst of summer. I even missed the feeling of darkness in winter that made you forget that it was only 3:30 in the afternoon.



I have been quite happy being settled at home for this past month so this sudden longing for Turku surprised me. It is, perhaps a mark of how as we grow older, new places begin to creep their way into our hearts and become the place we consider home. We replace the steadiness of the place of our childhood with the place (or places) that will be where we find stability as adults. And our relationship with those places is quite different than the place where we grew up. The latter is rooted in nostalgia while the former is rooted in responsibility and the future.



My new Finnish bed sheet for NYC,
thanks to the bf
The idea of home has been on my mind recently because the place I call home is about to change as I head to New York City to begin working on my PhD program. New York City is not a place I particularly want to live but it will be the place where I work for my future and where I will continue to pave my own path.


I cannot in all honesty say that I am eager for this next move. But the idea of continuing the growth that began in Turku in a city that literally grows every day does entice me somewhat. So while I will undoubtedly miss the nostalgia of home and have left a piece of my heart in Turku, while I plan on covering as much of my grad school apartment in memorabilia that remind me of both, I will try to take what I can from my new home. Because in it lies my future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Story time

I want to use this entry to write some of the stories that I think have been important or interesting while here in Finland. They aren't necessarily related to each other or even remotely profound in any way but they are all important to me for various reasons. The first is not even a specific moment but a place and a feeling. Right in front of the cathedral there is a bridge that crosses the Aura River. It is a beautiful bridge, with a cobbled stone path running parallel to the busy street. The cathedral stands tall on one side of the bridge and around it is a small square, also with cobbled stone. On the other side of the cathedral, running all the way along the river to the harbor is a promenade speckled with coffee shops and benches. One day when crossing the bridge I heard the unmistakable sound of bagpipes. Sure enough, there was a man playing them while standing close to the bridge. Hearing him filled me with a sense of gratitude for how many people ...
2 comments
Read more

Working Identities

The halls of a TC building where I must be a doctoral student It’s been a while since my last post. To be honest, I haven’t done much besides school work, to the point that the I no longer know what to tell people when they ask me what my hobbies are. Which also means I feel a constant looming pressure of knowing I live in a big city with a reputation for never sleeping yet I spend my weekends holed up in my room or in the library (and the occasional coffee shop). This is not to say that I spend all of my time doing doctoral work. I have found two outlets in the form of jobs that have enriched this semester in ways that I didn’t expect. One is at a preschool, the other is working at the Graduate Writing Center consulting students working on academic writing projects. After not working for two years, I had forgotten what it feels like to be part of something that allows for change that you can actually see. Teaching is always rewarding as you watch children grow and marvel...
Post a Comment
Read more

Becoming Finnish

I have spent the past six months passionately insisting that I will never join in on the uniquely Finnish experience of ice sauna-ing. Ice sauna-ing is a made up word for one of Finnish people’s favorite past times: going to a sauna and then jumping into a freezing lake. My friend is extremely persuasive and after six months of describing her own sauna-ing adventures managed to get me to agree to join her and her husband at a public sauna near a river. The sauna itself is a small wooden building attached to locker rooms and a common area where you can sit and eat after you are done. The first thing that catches your attention is the bridge going out above the water. Around the bridge the water is freely moving but farther out you can see it is frozen over and covered in snow. At the end of the bridge there are six sets of stairs leading into the water. What arrests the eye though is the people walking out onto the bridge wearing swimsuits and confidently walking straig...
Post a Comment
Read more