“There are no answers, only choices”

I watched the sci-fi movie Solaris (from 2002) with George Clooney and Natascha McElhone for the third time the other night, and each time I watch the film I ‘discover’ something else about it that I didn’t remember from previous viewings. The film was directed by Steven Soderbergh and is a remake of the classic film (from 1972) of the same name directed by Andrey Tarkovskiy. I have not seen the 1972 film although it is on my ‘to watch’ list; nor have I read the novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem published in 1961. I’m guessing that the Tarkovskiy film would probably be as haunting a film as the Soderbergh film. Because that is the only word I can use to describe Soderbergh’s film—haunting. It gets under my skin in a way that no other sci-fi film/story can, with the possible exception of ‘I Am Legend’ (film(s) as well as the story by Richard Matheson). Everything about the film, the atmosphere, lighting, sets, music—combine to create a poignant and haunting film. In my view, the casting of Clooney and McElhone in the major roles as Chris Kelvin and Rheya (his wife) was a small stroke of genius. They are both wonderful to watch in their roles as partners in a sad marriage that ends with Rheya committing suicide.  McElhone manages to portray Rheya as an extremely interesting and attractive woman despite her psychological problems—beautiful, intelligent, classy, and sad. Rheya is a seeker, open to ideas of faith and belief in things one cannot see, and she is uncomfortable with aggressive, all-knowing people who bark out their opinions as though they were the only correct ones. But she is also a depressive personality, a woman who lives on the fringes of life and society, looking in and wanting to be a part of the life she sees around her, but knowing that she does not fit in. Chris is a psychologist and a pragmatist; he only believes in what he can see and know and dissect, and there are several points in the film where he almost gloatingly scoffs at Rheya’s faith in something other-worldly. He is right and she is not. You know by watching her eyes and body language in the film that his lack of faith and his pragmatism are helping to destroy her slowly, because she loves him but does not seem able to reach him. But he does not understand this nor does he intend to hurt her deliberately. Theirs is a marriage where you know that they love each other but their love is doomed to difficulties and problems from the start because they are such contrasting personalities. You know that the only way that things will change for them is through a tragic event. Chris just does not understand his wife, her vulnerability or her psychological problems, even though he is a psychologist and even though she has tried to be honest with him about them. She aborts their baby without telling Chris because she does not want to pass her depressive tendencies on to a child, and he explodes in anger at her when he finds this out and storms out of their apartment, whereupon she commits suicide thinking he has left her for good. After her death, Chris ends up out in space, a long way from earth, in orbit around the planet Solaris, after having been asked to investigate the crew on board who are acting strangely and reporting strange events onboard the ship. Solaris is a planet that seems to be able to read the minds/dreams of Chris and his colleagues on board the spaceship, and manages to ‘recreate’ the people they have lost to death back on earth, the ‘visitors’. Chris’ visitor is Rheya, and even though he knows that she is not really human, he becomes involved with her all over again and realizes that he wants to be with her for the rest of his life, with all of the implications surrounding that choice. He is warned by one of the team members named Dr. Gibarian to leave Solaris and to return to earth, because otherwise he will die there. Gibarian is also another of Chris’ ‘visitors’ who committed suicide shortly before Chris’ arrival; on earth he was his colleague and friend. When Gibarian ‘visits’ Chris, they have a conversation, where Chris asks him “What does Solaris want from us?” Gibarian replies: “Why do you think it has to want something? This is why you have to leave. If you keep thinking there's a solution, you'll die here.” Chris replies “I can't leave her. I'll figure it out”, whereupon Gibarian says to him “Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you? There are no answers, only choices”.  And Chris makes his ‘choice’, and it is a choice that moves him from guilt to forgiveness to peace—his own spiritual evolution that allows him to move beyond his pragmatism and to take a leap of faith into the unknown. It is only by taking that leap of faith that he can know happiness, but he does not know that before he takes it. But he takes the risk.

It was the sentence —“There are no answers, only choices” that caught my attention this time while I watched the film.  I thought--how true that is. But I never ‘heard’ or truly internalized these words before, not the way I did the other night. Maybe because I have come to that point in my own life, where I have realized that there are no answers to certain situations, to certain problems—there are really only choices, and it is the fear of making the ‘wrong’ choice that can keep us stuck in one place. I seem to continue to want specific answers to specific problems though, and perhaps they will never be forthcoming. So if I learn to accept that there are no answers, then I turn to the choices to be made and ask myself, which is the right choice? But perhaps there are also no right or wrong choices, even though we want so much to make what we think is the ‘right’ choice—in love, in life, in work.  Perhaps we need to take more ‘leaps of faith’ into the unknown—because really, even when we make what we think is the right choice, we can never really know for sure what we are doing and whether it was the best choice. It simply is a choice that we made, that then led to a life. This is what is scary—should we take the leap of faith into the unknown of a new life, a new job, or a new relationship? And could we have escaped sadness and problems if we had chosen differently? Perhaps. But since we also do not have control over the lives and choices of others who impact on our lives because they are part of our lives, we cannot predict what will happen to us. It’s not easy to accept this sometimes, which makes it difficult to take the leap of faith into the unknown.

A lesson in employee satisfaction

”People are the most important resource we have at SKAGEN and it is therefore very gratifying that they are also very happy in their jobs. The workplace is demanding, but unique, and expertise and knowledge are important in all aspects of the organization”.

Mette Helgevold Årstad, SKAGEN Human Resources manager

Why you wonder, am I quoting a human resources manager and her views about the company she works for? It is because the company she works for is not just any company, it is a mutual funds company founded in 1993, and it was recently voted one of the top ten places to work in Norway by the Great Place to Work Institute. They surveyed 12,000 employees from 136 companies and SKAGEN FUNDS came in as #9 out of 68 companies with 50-250 employees. Impressive, if you ask me, but I’ve heard this before about the company. And it makes me wonder how they do it. How do they achieve employee satisfaction? Could it be the bonuses that they hand out at Christmas time to all employees, from high-level managers to secretaries? What is their secret? Whatever it is, I want to bottle it and share it with my (public sector) workplace, because at present it’s on the opposite end of the scale in terms of employee satisfaction, unfortunately. And I know a lot of the skeptics will tell me that SKAGEN is a private company and that things are done differently there. So what? Why can’t the public sector adopt other things from the private sector besides the goal of making money? Why can’t they learn from the private sector how to treat employees well?

Many people in this country have bought shares in mutual funds offered by SKAGEN; the company thus has a huge amount of money at its disposal for its national and global investments, and has done very well since its founding in 1993. They not only treat their employees well, they also treat their clients well. We recently attended the play ENRON courtesy of SKAGEN; they had a few hundred tickets that were made available on a first-come/first-served basis to attentive (answering an email ad) clients, and I just happened to be one of the lucky ones who got tickets when I saw the email advertising this. I like this idea of treating clients to a night out. The skeptics and the cynics I know were quick to add that the company can afford it and so on—that it’s just a drop in the financial bucket for them. I know this is true. But I ask--how many other companies are actually doing this for their clients? I appreciate the gesture. It’s not just the rich they’re courting; it’s the common man and woman. And I’m not naive; of course I know that they are looking for new clients. Again I say, so what—it’s their job and they do it well. They also offer seminars and courses, for example, on pensions and pension reform, saving for retirement, and so forth. I recently attended an evening seminar for women only which was very interesting, particularly the lecture about pensions, retirement, and early retirement. The seminar was free and during the break, the company provided tapas, dessert, fruit and wine. So again I say, if this is how they can treat their clients—by sharing a little of the wealth, then it’s not surprising that they also ‘share the wealth’ with their employees. Not too difficult to achieve employee satisfaction that way—by rewarding your employees for their hard work. But not only that, it seems to be an interesting place to work, even though it’s a high-pressure environment. SKAGEN seems to function well as a company and other companies could learn from them how to treat their employees. I’m not just talking about handing out bonuses at Christmas time; I’m talking about creating a work environment that appreciates and cares about its employees, at least from my vantage point. I’m talking about leadership that listens to and ‘sees’ its employees and likes them. There’s a lot right with this picture.

Good Friday and Easter Sunday

This is the third year I have attended Good Friday services at Gamle Aker church, a Protestant church that is very close to where I live in Oslo. The church was built around 1080 AD, making it the oldest building in Oslo. It is a beautiful old church with a lot of atmosphere—massive stone columns around the nave of the church that give it an air of being an ancient building. When you step into the church, you walk along a dark and cool aisle that leads to the altar; chairs have been placed on either side of the aisle for parishioners. The church is devoid of statues or any decorations save for a few candelabras on the altar. The service for Good Friday is divided into two parts: the first part is the passion and suffering of Christ, with a lot of readings interspersed with relevant songs from the choir which stands on the altar together with the priest. This part of the service ends with parishioners being able to stand or kneel before a crucifix so that they can pray or touch the feet of Christ, much as we do in the Catholic Church on Good Friday. But the thing that most surprised me and has kept me coming back is the second part of the service; this is a symbolic burial of Christ after he is taken down from the cross. The crucifix is placed on the ground in a circular area behind the altar, and parishioners are encouraged to take a flower and place it on the ‘grave’, then the priest says a few prayers and the service concludes. I found this part of the service to be incredibly poignant the first year I was part of it. It felt so real, and so sad, and that of course is the point of it. It is to make you realize that Christ died and was buried in this way. Experiencing this in a church from 1080 also has the effect of placing you that much closer to the actual event in history; at least that is how I ended up feeling, and I was glad for the experience.

On Easter Sunday I attended mass at St. Olav’s Catholic Church. I happened to attend the high mass, which is a mass sung in Latin or Norwegian, or in this particular case, both languages. It was a joyful celebration of the resurrection of Christ; the day was sunny and warm, the church was full of people, and the priest gave a very good sermon about doubt, the scientific search for evidence of Christ’s resurrection, and the importance of faith. His words struck a nerve; this is how I have been feeling lately. I see how important having faith is, much more important than having scientific explanations and evidence for everything that we doubt or that we meet with skepticism. Doubting Thomas comes to mind; Christ had a lot of patience with him but did tell him that some people had faith and did not need to ‘see’ what Thomas needed to see. Some things in this life are mysteries that we will never be able to explain. Love is one of them. We do not require explanations for why we love or why we are loved; as soon as we start to dissect love it can very well disappear or become merely banal. We trust another or others with our heart, with our love, and we take a leap of faith to do that—whether it is romantic love or friendship or charitable love. If we did not take that leap of faith, we could not give or receive love. We can gather as much knowledge about another person as is humanly possible; still that person is a mystery to us and will remain so until the day we die. We will have learned a little about that person but not everything. This does not stop us from loving. How important this is for me to remember when I doubt my faith; that I love and am loved. If I can experience love, then I can have faith and I can trust that Christ’s life and death have meaning for me and for our world. This is the Easter message and it has become a very important message for me. 

What Mother Teresa said

At Easter time, I am reminded of the words of Mother Teresa. She had a lot to say about living in the modern world, about loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted. At mass this past Sunday, the priest spoke about the very same things, and talked about the heavy crosses that many people in our society live with each day—depression, loneliness, unemployment, a demoralizing job, family problems--the list goes on. The priest meant that these conditions are our chance to share in the cross of Christ, and while that idea is very unappealing—to have a cross on our shoulders weighing us down that may ultimately lead to our demise--the fact remains that this is the human condition from time to time. I find some reassurance in knowing that my faith is founded on the suffering and death of a man who cared for others. His life was remarkable; the circumstances surrounding his death were not. He was treated as a common criminal and left to die, and before he died, he struggled with not wanting to fulfill his mission here on earth. How many times have we had that feeling ourselves? How many times have we wanted to run away from our problems, from unhappiness, from depression, from heavy responsibilities, from unpleasant situations, from unpleasant people? How many times has it been hard to smile after being pushed down one more time, after being trampled on one more time? How difficult it is to smile in the face of injustice, abuse, and ridicule. And yet there are people who do this every day. Get up and keep on going. Smile kindly and accept what others would not accept. Are these people crazy? Do they have something to teach us? Even Mother Teresa knew that most of us could never live her life. She was adamant about starting at home, that we had to learn to love the ones we live with before we could go out into society to do the same. Her wisdom is timeless and precious and too important not to share again. I read her books when I was younger, and here I am many years later, and her words make even more sense to me now.

·         Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

·         Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.

·         Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.

·         Even the rich are hungry for love, for being cared for, for being wanted, for having someone to call their own.

·         I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?

·         If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

·         If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

·         If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

·         Intense love does not measure, it just gives.

·         Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

·         Peace begins with a smile.

·         We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.

·         Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

·         Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.

·         Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.

·         Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do... but how much love we put in that action.

·         Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home.

·         We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

·         Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

·         The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

·         The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

·         There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in - that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

·         Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.

·         There must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. They must have worked for it. I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things that we could use.

·         We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

·         Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.

·         We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.

'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels'.......

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing". 

1 Corinthians 13

I was reminded of this passage today while in conversation with a good friend. I thought of it because we are both scientists and we both work in an academic research setting. We were talking about some of the sociopathic behavior we have been witness to or recipients of on different occasions in our workplace, and it struck me that a high degree of intelligence is absolutely no guarantee of good behavior (in the moral sense). Many young people are often told that education is the key to a better life, and while that may be true in the materialistic sense, it does not have to be true in a spiritual sense. A long education, an advanced degree, and a corresponding advanced career do not necessarily make a person a good person; they only make a person qualified for a specific job or career. And that is fine, but I have seen so much morally questionable behavior in my years in the workplace that I have learned that the quest for knowledge is an admirable thing, but not at the expense of your spiritual life or your soul. And that is what the above passage is trying to say to us—that we can have all the knowledge in the world but if we have not learned to love, all that knowledge is useless. It cannot help us.

I continue to be surprised by the poor behavior I see in people whom, as my mother would have said, are intelligent enough to know better. That is the responsibility that knowledge should impart—to use that knowledge carefully and responsibly, to treat others with respect—‘to do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. Well-educated people should know how to behave—should know that cheating, stealing, lying and misusing others are wrong and that it is best to avoid them. They should be actively leading the way toward a good spiritual life. The competitive world of academic science opens the doors to a lot of strange and morally ambiguous/morally wrong behavior. So then I ask, what is the point of all this knowledge if it is not to make the world a better place? If all this knowledge does not make us better people, then perhaps we would be better off without it? Perhaps it would be better to emphasize love and compassion in school instead. To paraphrase the above passage—‘what good does a high-impact factor publication do if I have not love? And though I have the talent for making money and gaining power and prestige and high rank, but have not love, I am nothing’. 

Changing jobs

So many people I know both here and in the USA are switching jobs or would like to. It’s not easy these days to get a new job in either country; there are usually hundreds of applicants for one position and the interview rate is abysmally low. Perhaps five people get called in to an interview out of fifty applicants; ten percent in other words. It may sound like a high percentage, but if you’re not one of the lucky five people, it doesn’t matter. I am so happy for the few people I know who have just found out that they will be starting new jobs and will be leaving my workplace. They deserve their new positions after years spent working hard and getting nowhere fast. Because my workplace does not really reward hard work and professional competence; it rewards other things—political savvy and a broad belief in the power of administrators and a balanced budget (a pipe dream). So again, if you’re not one of the lucky few who ‘makes’ it based on these characteristics, you don’t make it. I would need to write a book to explain why this is so; suffice it to say that if you are a doctor or a nurse or an administrator you are worth something to the hospital. If you are a scientific researcher, you are worth less these days simply because budgets have to be balanced and there is no direct ‘product’ from your work that can be measured in the same way as the hospital can measure the number of patients admitted, treated and released. The hospital wants numbers; scientists know that research takes time and that the results of research will be published eventually, but they have no control over how fast that process occurs. It can sometimes take two years to publish an article. This is not good for the bottom line of an accounting sheet. Why does it take so long? Because you can get an article rejected the first time around, also the second time around, and then perhaps it will be published on the third try. It can thus take up to one year to get an article accepted by a journal and another six months to a year before it is actually in print. Effective? No. Frustrating? Yes. Because the administrators want evidence of ‘production’ and it doesn’t go fast enough for them. We are not considered productive in the same way as a doctor or nurse would be. We are therefore expendable, and if it wasn’t for the fact that scientists working in the public sector are organized in this country, we would be the first to go, of that I have no doubt.

I know there is no such thing as the perfect job. But I know too that there are better workplaces than the one I work in; workplaces that are focused on their employees’ wellbeing, that want them to thrive and to succeed. Why is this important? Because these workplaces know that a happy motivated employee will do a good job for his or her workplace. It’s only to do the math. None of this is very complicated to figure out, and I’m surprised that more workplaces haven’t figured it out. I wish my workplace would figure it out. But I know they won’t and it’s time to just stop talking about it. I’m done, as one of my friends in New York often says. And she means it. I mean it too.

I know people in the USA who have been without a job for several years now. They have applied for food stamps in order to buy food and they ask family and friends for financial help. I know it’s not easy there to find a job or to keep it. I don’t know though if this is just the corporate world, or if this is true for the public sector as well. I don’t know how it is these days generally in the USA anymore where workplaces are concerned; I’ve been away from the country too long. I just know how it is here in Norway. A recent article stated that over fifty-five percent of workers want to retire when they are sixty-two years old. I am one of them. The article focused on the fact that most of these people are in for a shock when they find out how little their monthly pensions will actually be, and that they will find it difficult to live. I am taking steps to prepare myself for this eventuality. One of them is to sock away as much money each month as possible to make early retirement possible. Other possibilities include acknowledging that one may end up working part-time—two or three days a week. So many people tell me that I will be bored or that I will miss full-time work if I retire early. I already know that I won’t. I am looking forward to changing my life (and would love to change it now), to having time to do volunteer work, to read, to do consulting work, to write, and so many other things. I won’t be bored. Retirement could not be more boring than being stuck in a job where one is invisible, unused and unappreciated. Apparently fifty-five percent of all workers agree on one thing—by sixty-two they will have had enough of their workplaces. The problem of course is what they’re (we’re) all going to do with our newfound free time. As I said, I am making plans already. If plan A doesn’t work there will be plan B, and so forth. I am planning for retirement the way I never planned my career or my retirement investments when I was younger. But it’s never too late to start. And who knows, maybe I will be one of the lucky ones that ends my work life in a job that is fulfilling and that makes me happy--the way I felt ten to fifteen years ago about my job. Nothing beats that feeling of loving your work. But time changes things and the ways things are done, and you cannot hang onto the past or dwell there. It’s just to accept how the present is and plan from there.

Changing the world

It sometimes seems to me as though the apocalypse is coming, in one form or another, and perhaps it is best not to know how it will occur—earthquake, tsunami, meteor hitting the earth, droughts, fires, floods—there could be many different scenarios. It didn’t help to hear today that the nuclear crisis in Fukushima Japan has been upgraded to Chernobyl status. I wonder how much more Japan can take. How much is too much before a country collapses? I look at what we are doing to our planet in addition to the natural disasters that occur, courtesy of Mother Nature, and we don’t need to add our man-made disasters to the natural ones. I need only think of the chlorine poisoning of the Akerselva River to remind me that carelessness abounds and that many disasters are man-made, and that animal life suffers at our hands. The world has witnessed recent oil spills and the tragic loss of animal and fish life. We really need to start re-thinking our priorities. I think there is so much that is topsy-turvy in the world, average ordinary people know it, and they know or sense that some monumental change is coming, because this unlimited greed and consumption and utter indifference to anything other than a huge paycheck cannot continue. God knows what that will be--perhaps a huge worldwide revolution against greed and inhumanity and lack of concern for the planet, or a return to a simpler way of life, more agrarian, less industrialized, less money-oriented, and less competitive. I’d be all for it.

It’s hard not to feel drained by the way we are living our lives now, and very tiring to hear that nothing can change because this is ‘just the way the world is’—full of greed, competition, unscrupulousness, lack of empathy (for people and for animals), carelessness, indifference, and hatred. I know there are good average ordinary people in the world, because I know a lot of them and I am one myself. But the people in power are the ones who worry me. The Wall Street moguls are the ones who worry me. And why I ask do we need Wall Street? Really, why do we? Why can’t we start by dismantling Wall Street? I applaud Michael Moore in his recent film Capitalism: A Love Story, for trying to make a citizen’s arrest of Wall Street denizens at the end of the film. Of course you laugh or smile when you see him do that, but you know too that he is serious, even though he is making a point. There is no real work done on Wall Street from the standpoint of actually producing viable products. And when did it become cool to buy warrants and derivatives in the hope that a company will do poorly so that you can earn money on the possibility of its failure? I just don’t get the world these days. Literally everything has to do with money, all business and political decisions seem to be guided solely by the prospect of making money. It’s boring. It’s become a non-creative world that is slowly sinking into a quagmire. And perhaps the best thing is to let it sink so that it can be replaced by a better world—one in which people in power care about the planet and the lands they live in, one in which money isn’t the be-all and the end-all of everything .

Feeling useful

It’s been a while since I’ve done as much physical work as I did today and during the past two weeks. Our dining room renovations are finished for the most part (there are still some small jobs to do), so much of the physical work today involved hours of cleaning and vacuuming—floors, walls, furniture, books—anywhere where the fine white sand and dust from all the sanding and construction work had settled. As far as I can see, it seems to have settled everywhere! But today was amazingly effective, as was this past week. I have to emphasize that the efficiency is at home, not at work. That’s because I can plan the work at home as I like, no one is standing over me assessing my productivity and efficiency except me. I’m my own slave driver. I don’t need others to do that job. But the wonderful efficiency I experience at home is in stark contrast to the inefficiency I experience at present on a daily basis at work. How is it possible, is what I’m always asking myself? I’m still waiting for my budget problems to be corrected (going on two years now); I informed my superiors that my budgets were incorrect and they sent the message further and the mistake is still not corrected. I am having problems with one email account and don’t know who to talk to about having it fixed. I need to order supplies but the person who normally does that is on sick leave and has been for a while. The other day I went to make a telephone call out of Norway (work-related) and was interrupted by the operator who promptly told me that I needed permission from the accounting department and my superiors to make international calls. This was new to me and since I’m not sure who to talk to, it’s easier not to make any calls. The hospital is apparently in dire straits these days—no money---so they’re adopting desperate measures to reduce spending. All hiring has been stopped. It will be interesting though to see if the hospital will continue to hire administrators. It seems we cannot have too many of them and we cannot live without them. Here’s a joke (of my own creation)—how many administrators does it take to order, purchase and screw in a light bulb? At least six if not more—one has to look at the work order, another has to approve it, another has to order the bulb, another has to send the invoice to the accounting department, another has to pay the bill, and another has to file the paid invoice. And of course I forgot—the delivery department also has to get involved in order to deliver the bulb, and then someone has to install it.

I really enjoyed working hard and efficiently today. I felt useful—to my home, to myself, to my marriage, to my life and to my future. That is what I thrive on—feeling useful, feeling that the work I do is useful. Seeing the results, seeing the clean and organized home, seeing the finished renovations, the painted walls, the sanded and lacquered floors. 

I could start a consulting business to organize people’s homes. I think I would be good at it. I like the work—sorting through papers and files, categorizing things, seeing the neat results (literally). Hours pass in this way and it’s pleasant, at least to me. I know that a lot of people hate to clean and organize. But we grew up with the Catholic philosophy—“cleanliness is next to godliness”—it was talked about in school. Makes sense to me. It doesn’t mean that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder or that I have to clean on a daily basis. It’s enough to get the major stuff done and out of the way, and that can be a couple of times a year at most if it involves sorting and organizing. Getting things accomplished in this way clears the mental path for other projects on the waiting list. I hate procrastination above most things, and I knew too many procrastinators in my earlier years. It’s just to ignore them and keep on. I hope my work life goes back to being efficient. It was so efficient and streamlined for many years; then came the mergers and the efficiency and productivity got shot to hell. I hope the tide turns and we go back to a daily work life that makes sense and that makes me feel useful again. 

On civility and respect

I was talking to one of my friends the other day, and our conversation veered into the area of civility and respect for others. She was bemoaning the lack of respect that she deals with on an often daily basis in her job as grammar school teacher. The fact of the matter is that children don’t respect teachers nor are they instructed at home to do so. Her feeling is often that some parents have ‘abandoned ship’ by not involving themselves in their children’s education. I listen to her frustration and understand that it must be very difficult to teach when you do not have the attention and respect of your class. This is not to say that all her pupils are like this, but those who are disrespectful make it difficult for the rest of the class, as always. I remember this from my own grammar school days, seething because one or two boys disrupted the class and the teacher ended up punishing the entire class for the sins of a few. But generally, the disrespect and the lack of manners that we are witnessing at present are slowly destroying the fabric of society. We need respect and civility in order to deal with each other on a daily basis. When these disappear, I think I will move to the hills, far away from everyone, and live as a hermit.

Oslo is now trying to do something about the lack of manners that abound on public transportation. There have been several newspaper articles recently describing how younger people are not offering their seats on buses or trams to older people or to pregnant women for example during rush hour, and discussions and debates abound on television about how to deal with the problem. In my book, it’s a simple answer. Just do it. Just open your mouth and offer your seat to an older person or an obviously pregnant woman. For every person who says no thanks, there are two who will say thank you and take you up on your offer. It costs nothing to try offering your seat. It is better than never offering it at all. Have we become such a passive society that we ignore what is going on around us? Are we so tuned out listening to our music or reading our newspapers that we cannot see what is going on around us? Have we become thoughtless people? There are other problems as well. There is no such thing as ‘cueing up’ in Norway, at least not from what I can see in Oslo. Lines that form are suddenly ‘ignored’ by a few people who decide that they need to be first. It is infuriating to witness this, because none of the Norwegians get angry either when this happens (except me, the American and the New Yorker). I just think back to the time when there was a public transportation strike in New York City during the early 1980s; lines stretched around the block to take the private buses that transported folk to and from the different boroughs, and you could easily wait in line for an hour to board a bus. If you had tried to cut in line before someone else, you would have had your head handed to you. New Yorkers believe in lines and they will (loudly) defend their place in line and prevent another from unfairly cutting in line before them. That’s just how it is and I for one think it’s correct to comment someone else’s rude behavior if they try to cut in line. It may lead to arguments, but hey, that’s better than standing by passively letting the rudeness and disrespect occur.

A new and particularly disrespectful trend among some people (especially the younger people but also some middle-aged as well) is to double or triple book an evening—in other words, to say yes to two or three invitations and then to choose the best or what they consider to be the coolest event to attend. I am just surmising that this is the case because I have no other explanation for the behavior. I have now witnessed (and experienced personally) this several times.  On one occasion, I invited several people to a small dinner party, and all of them said they could come. The day before the dinner, I sent out a little reminder email and wished everyone welcome. Immediately afterward, I received an email from one person telling me she could not make it because of last minute work deadlines. Had I not emailed her, she would not have showed up and would not have informed me at all. I would have called her wondering where she was and she would have waited until then to tell me. I cannot rule out that she had made other plans that were more important to her. On the evening in question, another person almost didn’t come because her thirty year old son was returning home from traveling and she ‘suddenly’ had to pick him up at the airport. As it was, she showed up late but at least she showed up. But those of us who were present at the dinner wondered why he couldn’t just have taken a taxi home when he knew his mother had made other plans. But it was her fault anyway for not standing up for herself and saying that she had other plans. And so it goes. On a recent job outing (dinner out at a restaurant), ten people had agreed to meet for dinner and all of them expressed enthusiasm about getting together, even up until three days before we were all to meet. Exactly three days before the dinner, four people canceled: two had made other plans and were completely open about this (!); one said it would probably be difficult for her to make it without giving any specific reason; and one was genuinely sick. A table had been booked for ten people, and six people showed up. I can only wonder how conferences and seminars can plan anything, especially if food is ordered for participants. You could order food for two hundred people who say they will attend a seminar, and one hundred people show up. As I recall now, that has also happened in recent years, and the participants ended up taking the leftover food home. But the arrangers still had to pay for it. It’s completely rude and disrespectful to behave this way, but it has become much more common now than before. I never remember people behaving this way before. I have another example from last autumn—also work-related. A tour of Oslo’s haunted old buildings had been planned and ten people said they would join. A guide was booked (that ten people would have paid for). Only three people showed up. The tour was fun and very interesting, but even the guide seemed a bit taken aback and wondered where the other seven people were. This is just plain wrong--bad behavior, rude behavior. The seven people who did not show up knew that they were leaving the eventual cost over to three people. Disrespectful. As it was, the bill was paid by our institute and did not come out of our pockets, simply because one of the bosses also thought as I did, that this behavior was irresponsible. I am commenting on this type of behavior because it seems as though this is where society is heading. We ‘commit’, but only half-heartedly. We don’t show up and we don’t feel bad (none of the ‘cancellers’ in question felt badly about their behavior). We cannot count on the word of another. And that is something to worry about. If this type of behavior had just happened once, I would be inclined to let it go as a one-time thing. But unfortunately it is becoming all too prevalent. People need to speak up, to say ‘this is rude’, ‘I don’t like this behavior’ and so forth. Having manners and respect for others is part of what it means to be a responsible adult, and children need to be taught these as well. But they cannot learn the correct way to behave from adults when the adults themselves don’t know how to behave.

A short update about the Akerselva River

I attended a scientific seminar this morning having to do with how to restore life to a dead river, specifically the Akerselva River in this instance. It was called ’Kan kunnskap hjelpe Akerselva’, which translated to English literally means ’Can knowledge help the Akerselva’. It was sponsored by The Ministry of the Environment http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/md.html?id=668. It was a well-attended seminar, which was heartening. The Minister of the Environment and International Development, Erik Solheim, opened the seminar and meant that after several weeks of sorrow and mourning for the river that died, it was time to work together to bring the river back to life. And that was why his department had decided to tap the knowledge of those who know rivers—scientists who have spent their entire careers studying them, gathering data on what happens when pollution and chemical spills destroy river life. There were five speakers, who also participated in a question and answer session with the audience afterward. Their individual talks were good and quite informative, and I must say that I gained a lot of new information as well as some new ways of looking at rivers. One of the speakers reminded us that we have to look at rivers from a three-dimensional perspective and that was useful information. It made me understand that the Akerselva River will come back stronger than ever. I left the seminar somewhat optimistic. Despite the massive death of fish and river bottom life, there was some encouraging news. Some of the salmon eggs that had been buried deeper down in the gravel at the river’s bottom had actually survived the chlorine spill. That was good news and a good way to start a new week.   

Musings about change and depression

Nearly a year has gone by since I began writing this blog. I began writing it to help me deal with the many changes that were occurring in my workplace, among other things. The changes themselves would have been difficult enough to deal with in my home country (USA), but the fact that they happened here in Norway made them even tougher. That is because it has been nearly impossible to ‘crack the code’ in terms of understanding how my workplace functions, what leaders want (or don’t want), how to get ahead, how to ‘get around’ some of the ancient rules that govern it, and so forth. It has made me feel somewhat better to know that many Norwegians in my workplace haven’t been able to make sense of the changes either. Cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless. Because unless you’ve lived in another country for a number of years, you have no idea of what can happen to you and your sense of judgment in a different culture. No matter what happens, you will always question yourself and your sense of judgment first when things don’t go as planned. Did I interpret this wrong, was I to blame, did I misunderstand the other person or the conclusions from a meeting, and so on. I have spent many years trying to fit in ‘career-wise’, trying to understand the Scandinavian corporate/business/academic mentality, doing my best, giving my all, in the quest to do a great job and to succeed as a research scientist. It has not been easy. It would not have been easy anywhere else either, but it was doubly hard here to succeed in any way because of the extra effort that had to go into trying to figure out the system. I have not been fortunate enough to have had mentors or sponsors. My husband has been a wonderful support system but he has also had difficulties of his own trying to figure out his workplace (we now work for the same hospital conglomerate, just in different locations of the city).

During the past year I have written a lot about my work life in an attempt to understand what happened to my workplace and by extension, to me and my colleagues during that time. The past three to four years have been transition years involving a lot of reorganization and restructuring associated with a huge merger of four major city hospitals, and when the dust settled, it was time to start the process over again since the powers that be who organized the first restructuring were not satisfied. And so it goes. I’ve written about colleagues who have had difficulty adjusting to all the changes; I’ve written about my own struggles adjusting to so many changes. Not all the changes have affected us directly, but even if they have not, they affect workplace morale generally, because budgets have been cut, the quality of patient care is always being questioned, research grant support has been reduced, and there is a lot of talk about the good old days when there was more money available and less bureaucracy and administration. But there is no point in talking about the old days. They are gone. There is much more bureaucratic control now, and a hierarchy of leadership that did not exist before. Is it a better system? Only time will tell. If it works out, it will be because employees made a concerted effort to make it work. There is no guarantee that it will work out, however, and that is the big gamble. The politicians who decided on this huge merger can be voted out, and the new ones who come in can in principle decide to reverse some of what has happened if they don’t like what they see. Plus there is always something new on the horizon, some new social trend or policy that can be implemented so that the legacies of different politicians will be ensured. In the meantime, huge social experiments go unremarked. I wonder if there are sociologists studying the effects of huge mergers on employees. I am waiting for the data from those studies. But so far, I haven’t heard of any such studies.  

 

Massive changes can make workers unhappy and even depressed, especially when they do not really understand what is happening around them. To be fair, despite considerable effort to keep employees informed, it is nearly impossible for a workplace to prepare them for all eventualities. But what employees want to know is not how fantastic everything is going to be once the dust settles; they want to know how the changes are going to affect them personally. They need reassurance that their jobs are not in danger. They need to hear that they are more than just chess pawns who can be pushed around on the chess board, plucked up from one area of the board and set down on another. They want to hear that they are doing a good job; they want to know that their projects can proceed as usual; they want some normalcy and stability in a highly unstable situation. There are always employees who thrive on continual change. The majority of employees thrive on stability, and that has to be recognized and accepted by workplace leaders. You cannot demand loyalty and obedience from your employees while telling them that their jobs might be in danger. You cannot tell them to ‘get out’ if they don’t like what is happening around them. This was essentially the message from one of my workplace leaders in a lecture she gave prior to a Christmas party (of all things) several years ago. Some people may have liked her style. I found it unappealing and rather tactless, because she was stating the obvious and didn’t need to. It’s aggressive and unnecessarily so. It’s not how you win friends and influence people. A better approach might have been to have said that there will be changes and that some of them may be difficult, but that we are a team and that if we all pull together, we can get through the changes and perhaps come out stronger. But she is a pawn herself in a long line of pawns that have to spout the company line. I doubt she felt comfortable spouting the rhetoric. If I am representative of the average worker, all I can say at this point in time is that the vagueness and ambiguity that existed prior to the merger have gotten larger, not smaller. It is not possible to get an overview, no matter how hard one tries. I find it difficult in any case. Do I need the overview? I don’t know. I’ve been told that I do, that it’s important to understand the workplace and management structure. Some people I know wonder who their bosses are, because in some cases, people now have three or more bosses—some who have administrative responsibility for employees, some who have the professional responsibility. But when employees ask who their new boss is, they don’t get an answer. So is it any wonder that employees get depressed?

Depression, according to the psychiatrist and author Rollo May, is the “inability to construct a future”. For some reason this definition resonated with me. I responded to it viscerally and intuitively. Why? Because it felt true. When you are depressed, you are stuck. You don’t know which way to turn, because you don’t have a clue about the future. You cannot envision your future nor can you see how to go about building or creating it. In order to create anything, you must be able to visualize it first. With depression you lose the ability to visualize the future. You are stuck in the now. All your creative and mental energy goes into figuring out the ‘now’.  It’s as though a fog settles over your head, blocking your forward view. You are forced to stop driving and to sit on the side of the road. You become passive, waiting for instructions or a road map for how to proceed further. Your energy flow gets blocked. Or you may drive around the same area over and over, stopping at the same stop sign, and not getting any further, because you have lost your sense of direction. Depression may not be a bad thing if you manage to deal with it eventually, if you get frustrated enough with being stuck. It is harmful when you give up and give in and those approaches become a permanent way of dealing with the trials that life deals out.

The Chinese talk about chi (qi), the energy flow in a person, as being an important aspect of a person’s health and life situation. It makes sense to me. If that energy flow is blocked, it will affect the health and energy level of a person. Again, I respond to this intuitively; it just makes sense. The blockage must be dealt with in order for the energy to flow. The goal is harmony for the mind and body. Sometimes it is enough just to read an inspirational text; the blockage may dissipate once the mind understands the situation in a new way. That is the beauty and the power of the written word. In other situations, a good film or conversation may achieve the same thing. The important thing is to free the energy.