Fleeting Thoughts

My approach is practical, creative, and holistic. I call it "dramatic" because I use actors' tools, incl. relaxation/ breathing, movement, games, and role-plays. Why? Because in real life we do not just sit behind a desk, we speak, listen, move. We multitask. 
 
DISCLAIMER: I don't believe anyone is capable of reading and listening at the same time AND be a 100% present, no matter what my husband says. 
 
With multitasking I mean connecting different parts of the brain, the cerebrum for speaking and the cerebellum for moving. The brainstem controls automatic functions, such as breathing. Conscious breathing exercises are helpful in anxiety provoking situations, such as a language class, as they calm down the automatic nervous system. Instead of fight, flight, or freeze as a response to threat, the system gets the message “All OK” and the thinking brain can function better.
 
For an actor, it's one thing to learn your lines by heart, but another to remember them the first time you rehearse a scene in which you have to interact with others, move and speak at the same time. It’s the same when we come out of a classroom, we are not just sitting at desks and repeat what the teacher just said. 
 
Memorising and learning benefit from repetition, movement, and context. I believe that topics that are important to the learner, raise interest in learning.  Using role-plays, improvisation, and enacting different emotions enable us to understand other perspectives and create various contexts. "Multitasking" in the classroom makes it much easier to communicate in a foreign language in the real world and to improvise if we can’t remember a particular word.
 
Life happens. If I can improvise, I can let it. 

The best about Holistication's Gift Certificates: You can gift them all year round, they are not just for Xmas.

And, while I'm talking about a miracle, Marko, a coach from Business Joensuu, has just created one.

In terms of the Internet I'm like a child, well almost. I know  that I shouldn't believe everything I'm told, but how it all works is still a mystery to me. 

Anyway, Marko took his time and explained to me, on the very basic level that I could understand, how and what Google needs to be able to understand me.

​I didn't know that it was THAT easy!  Honest, this was a revelation! A big shout out to Marko!

I have to get back to work. Have a great day and remember: inhale - exhale, inhale- exhale
 
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Yesterday someone said to me that life is all about stories, and that we have a choice whether we choose fear or love. I agree. We always have the choice whether we want to continue and repeat the same story or find a different ending. It's up to you and me. 
I will tell you a little story and you can decide what you want to do with it. 

....Imagine there's no countries 
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too .....
John Lennon, Imagine

The other day I stepped out of my local supermarket and saw a group of young guys, maybe 17-20 years old, who, despite their tender age emanated a rotten smell and disturbing images from the past. They were dressed in 90's skinhead gear and one of them was wearing a t-shirt displaying a picture of Hitler together with a Thank you Message.

My neck swelled up with rage (rage is always a good way to cover fear) and I was speechless. What do you say in the face of so much ignorance and cynicism? I didn't follow my first impulse, namely screaming at them, closely followed by tattooing a swastika on their foreheads and sending them to Israel. No, acting out of hate doesn't make things better.
​
I sat with my anger, fear and sadness. My time of brooding is over and I thought I'd lay an egg for thought.

I think I sat in a movie watching Dangerous Liaisons. I'm not a hundred percent sure because I was really stoned that night. The next morning the Berlin wall was open. 
On 9 November 1938 I wasn't even a twinkle in my father's eye but here I am, trying to connect the past to the now and to the future. 
I translated with DeepL and quote: "9 November 1938 is an incisive date in twentieth-century German history. The "Reichspogromnacht" represents a preliminary climax of the persecution of Jews in National Socialist Germany - a persecution that had its first systematic Reich-wide publicity with the boycott campaign in 1933, which gave itself a "legal form" in the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and which ultimately found its destination in the extermination camps."(bpb_german) 

Please note that none of those events happened just like that. They were results of slow, persistent processes.

In my haydays, the 1980s and 90s, nobody would have thought that extreme right-wing thought and action would ever build a nest in the mainstream of society again. (I'm not thinking of a nest with cute chicks. I'm thinking of smouldering cells preparing to ignite.)
Yes, there were some who were "proud to be German", but they were frowned upon. It just was condoned, despised, unacceptable.

​We had learned everything about national socialism and the Holocaust and knew, from the bottom of our hearts: NEVER AGAIN. We had learned the facts. But, and this is based in my own experience, I had not learned to deal with the feelings of shame and guilt that came with the facts. And, this is my hypothesis, 1) not many people had 2) and now we have the salad, a direct translation of a phrase that expresses the fact that we're a in a pickle.

For many years I did not only feel a lot of shame but also guilt for the atrocities Germans had committed between 1933 and 1945. I cringed every time I had to tell someone I was from Germany. Living in Paris, I would say, "Je suis Berlinoise", after all, since Kennedy it was ok to be a Berliner. In London I always added "half Finnish", which was often greeted with a "You are half finished? HAHAHA!) Full of German shame I hid behind my Finnish-ness which, as it turns out, has its limits in terms of WW2. 

Be as it may, the operative word is hide. I hid. This is what shame does. It makes us hide in dark corners and makes us sweep things under the rug. It is in the darkness, where that, what we are ashamed of can, without us realising, grow and eat its way into our thoughts and lives until it is back. 
And suddenly ordinary people, people like you and me, demonstrate and walk next to right wing extremists, dare I say neo nazis. On Mondays they go for walks against refugees, against masks during Covid or the raise of gas prices.They know no shame. ​And suddenly the boundaries blur between what is right and right. 

Outside my hometown I didn't know many Germans. Living abroad, I didn't socialise with Germans and for years, I hardly spoke German until I took a course to teach it as a foreign language. For some people I might have been the only German (only half!!) they had ever seen and was met with comments about the war. (Don't mention the war!) One day I found myself in London's Goethe Institut and with a BANG I realised that THIS was German culture. Writers, Thinkers, Philosophers of different political and religious orientation, greeting me from different decades and centuries. They had in common their passion for thought and prose, and through it they had beautified and maybe even bettered the world.​ Absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

Nothing to be proud of either. Their work was theirs, I could admire it, be inspired by it, but I couldn't take merit for it. In the same vein ​I understood that the terrible actions of generations before me are not mine to feel ashamed of. Shame and fear gives them power and make them live on. 

I mustn't feel ashamed or frightened. Shame and fear close the brain and won't allow me to learn. I don't have to make all mistakes myself, I can learn from the mistakes others made. I can observe where others went wrong and choose a different path. ​

As long as there are borders and countries, nationality is probably always going to be a part of personal identity. But, ACHTUNG!- STRONG OPINION, it cannot and must not be the only basis for a person's identity. 

To those who are proud to be of a particular nationality, those who say that they are the real, true, and only deal, those who say that the Holocaust is a lie, those who want to lull others with fear and stereotypical black and white thinking I say: Fear not. You are loved. You are safe. You can be sure, that it will happen NEVER AGAIN. ​

Too much or too little of shame, fear and guilt as part of the identity can cause great damage, not only on a personal level, but also on a national level. After all, the national level of identity is based on those personal identities that make up the nation or, to say it with Karl Mannheim, people in a society and community are part of a common horizon of experience. Every person’s life is an individual process nestled within collective evolutionary developments, historic events, geographical features, and socio-cultural education which in turn are shaped by the individuals of their time.

We are the individuals of our time. We shape the world we live in. Let's give following generations reasons to think well of us. 
​Thank you for reading, have a good day.
Yours, Pia

My friend shares an office with some guys and a huge calendar on the wall. It's a calendar with cars and almost naked women who, judging by their body postures, seem to be sexually attracted to the cars. I don't know if the feelings are reciprocated. The calendar was there before my friend moved in. You might think, hey, boys will be boys, it's just some pictures. My friend thinks the calendar is inappropriate and offensive. MeToo.  
* I'm sorry if you expected different content, but I really wanted to grab your attention. 

She sent a text with a photo of the calendar into our girlfriends' WhatsApp group and we sent her calendars with firemen. Of course, on some level it is good to make light of situations. But there is a part in all of us, that doesn't want to joke but needs to be taken seriously. If we don't take ourselves seriously, who will?

My friend has a history of sexual abuse that has paralysed her for many years, and she slowly learns to live with it. Her trauma started at home and, as traumas do, spread into other areas of her life. 

She, like many, (or most?) of us, was told many times, "be nice", "don't make such a racket", "don't make a fuss", "come on, don't be like that."  And we didn't. And many of us still don't. 
But here's the thing. Unless we make a racket and a fuss, unless we are just like THAT, nothing will change. 

As a child, my friend was a victim. She experienced the worst. The experiences, and the fears that came with them, trapped her in the role that was forced upon her. She was a victim for many years, far beyond childhood and long after the abuse stopped. She did as she was told and now, after extensive trauma work, she dares to come out of hiding.
​She allows herself to be offended. But what to do next??  

She talked to other women in the company and the industry. They told her that it was unacceptable, "It wouldn't be hanging there, if I worked there" and "It's a management issue, talk to your boss", " I would quit."  "Why do I have to be so sick and make it a problem?" my friend asked me today, "Why can't I be normal, like they are?" 

I don't know their story, maybe they were never told not to be like THAT. But most of us were, otherwise we wouldn't have to deal with MeToo.
I was, and I experienced multiple MeToo situations until I learned to come out of my victim role and make a fuss. All those situations in the past have shaped me. Back then I was trapped.  Today I have a voice and a choice. I can choose my perspective and my attitude toward life and everything in it. This is not something I learned at home, but I learned it anyway, and everybody can. 

Feelings are not facts. But they can guide us if we listen to them. But how many times did we not listen to the gut that told us, RUN!  How many times did we stay and smiled?
No matter what we were told as little girls, we do not have to be nice and we don't have to stay in situations or relationships that don't nurture us. 

But here is the crux. We tend to choose today's relationships based on the patterns we learned in the past. If we don't speak up today, nothing will change. Not at work, not at home, not on the bus, in the theatre, or anywhere else.
As an adult, I cannot expect others to take responsibility for me and my life. I cannot expect others to stop, if I don't tell them to stop. 

I know. Why should I, as a woman, have to explain to a man, that they're behaving in a sexist way? Why should we speak up when we are affected by sexism, racism, or any other ism?
Because before we can change anything, we need to be aware and create awareness. 
I cannot assume that the other one knows. I must assume that they don't know any better.  If we stand on a packed train in the winter and you step on my foot, with your big fat winter boots, you won't know that you stepped on my foot, unless I tell you. Management won't know what's going on, if those managed don't tell them. Perpetrators won't tell on themselves, it's the victim's job, but in the process, they won't be victims anymore.

Question: Would you stop doing something you enjoy of your own accord if no one told you not to do it? Exactly.  Why should anyone else? 
I know it's scary, but it's the only way, we need to learn to speak up as soon as we are aware of something, otherwise MeToo will never end.  We can't change the past. We can't run away from it, and we can't hide from it. We need to face it. And we need to unlearn those old patterns and replace them with new ways of acting in this world.

This process of speaking up can take time. Like anything we learn, it requires letting go of what we know, new input, repetition, consistent effort and practice, practice, practice. Like anything we learn, it won't be always easy and sometimes it will feel as if we have reached a plateau or even taken a few steps back. But that's part of the process. The most important thing is to look at the results so far and trust, that the process will continue if we are diligent and pay attention to our attitude. I can, I want, and I will.

While anger is a healthy emotion that fuels me into action, I no longer want to be angry by default. Staying angry doesn't help me. I found that being angry just creates more anger. 
I get more out of my life when I am kind towards myself and others. Here I would like to make a distinction between being nice and being kind.
I am nice if I say yes, even though I mean no. I am kind if I can say no with a smile. 

I have a choice today. I can view my experiences as wounds that will never heal. Wounds,  that stifle me and break open at the slightest touch. Or, I can look at them as layers of an armour that protects me. An armour that is so strong that it makes me invincible. Or, I can develop my experiences into a superpower and help others on their way. 

I don't know what my friend will do. The past violations have injured her, yes, but she knows that she has a choice. She has courage and now she is presented with the opportunity to grow  stronger and more self-confident. By sharing her distress with me she already worked on her superpower.  Thank you, my friend.

Nowadays I usually am upbeat and positive, but that day I felt crappy and emotionally hungover. I was  working through some old stuff that defines my current present.
It's tedious work, requiring one step at a time, sometimes two going back. I've learned over the years that I can either try to escape from my feelings or face them. My personal research brought me to the conclusion that escaping didn't work, and that the latter option is more tedious but in the long run more sustainable. 

After a whole day of gloomy thoughts I went to my favourite place by the lake and sat down on a bench, wrapped into my coat, beanie and gloves. The fact that it was only the second of  September, didn't make it any better!
After all those years of living in Finland, I still haven't got used to the Finnish autumn, which is decidedly colder and tougher and more abrupt than autumns I have experienced in other countries. Oh well, it was a beautiful summer while it lasted. 
​So anyway, I sat on that bench, feeling a bit sorry for myself, lacking vision or any hope for the future, staring at the lake, hoping to find a glimpse of lightness, almost forcing a vision to appear.