On the tragedy in Japan

Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918) was professor of divinity at the University of Oxford and the canon of Christ Church in Oxford. He wrote “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”

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It is hard to imagine writing this and feeling its truth. When we watch TV these days and see how many people have perished or are missing in Japan, we know that death is something, not nothing at all. But these words were written by Holland to comfort loved ones, who needed to hear that their departed loved ones were not really so far away from them, just in another ‘room’. And if it was possible to keep life as normal as possible, then it was possible not to miss the departed so much because they were really still with us. My thoughts tonight go out to the Japanese people. I cannot shake the images that I have seen on TV. I also saw that the film Hereafter was pulled from Japanese theaters. I am glad, because that film opens with a horrific tsunami. I have written about this film in another post. It’s hard not to ponder death, the meaning of death, the horror of death as Japan has experienced. Why do so many people have to die in this way? It is not possible to ignore the suffering, the tragedy, the sheer overwhelming feeling of helplessness. How does one help? Is it best to pray? Send money? Hope for the best? What is the best in the face of this kind of destruction? If the nuclear reactors experience meltdown, what then? Suddenly out of nowhere, tragedy strikes. That is how tragedy operates. Earthquake, tsunami, meltdown? Life-changing events. Lives changed forever. There but for the grace of God go we, an old expression that means that it could have been us given other circumstances but that God’s grace spared us. Why didn’t it spare the Japanese people? It’s hard to understand this. It’s hard to understand the immensity of this type of suffering. It’s hard not to get overwhelmed. But it’s important not to because we must be ready to help, at any time. I admire the soldiers and all the medical personnel who are helping in the search for survivors. They are heroes. I just hope they survive the trauma of what they see and deal with. And mostly I hope that the Japanese children find some sort of solace—it must be terrifying for them to see what is happening around them and not to understand it. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it all go away for them. I wish that so intensely.  

Nowhere to run to

And so it happened again, a major earthquake that generated a devastating tsunami—this time off the coast of northeast Japan. The horrific images of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that rolled in over Thailand and Indonesia are still vivid in my memory. This quake in Japan was a major one—a magnitude of 8.9 on the Richter scale is being reported, and that is scary enough. Just as disturbing are the video footages of the tsunami sweeping across coastal farmland carrying boats, cars and burning houses in its wake. Other videos show submerged cars and boats being pushed toward a highway overpass, and it is both terrifying and amazing to see how boat masts are just crushed like plastic toys. I watch such scenes and cannot help but think of the Mayan prophecy that says that the world will end in 2012 (more precisely, the Mayan calendar ends on the Gregorian calendar date of December 21, 2012 which has led to intense speculation about what this means for the planet). And if you have seen the film 2012 (not very good except for the special effects for earthquake scenes and subsequent destruction) you will understand that there really is nowhere to run when these types of things happen, because there is usually very little warning. I am glad that we do not live in a geographical area that is prone to earthquakes. My thoughts go to the Japanese people—I hope and pray that there will not be a huge loss of life as there was in Indonesia.

The power and fury of nature and of water never cease to amaze me. I just wrote about the Akerselva river and how its fish and insect life died in the space of one night due to a chemical spill. But the river itself keeps running down to the sea and hopefully always will. Back in November 2000, unusually large amounts of rainfall in Oslo resulted in extremely high water levels in the Akerselva that threatened to flood surrounding areas. We live about a five-minutes’ walk from the river, at a point where there are small waterfalls. When we opened our apartment windows facing toward the river, we could hear the river as it roared past. We joined many others who stood watching from a safe distance as this ordinarily peaceful river roared mightily past us. The spray from these falls was so intense as to take your breath away. I have never seen so many people out late in the evening, watching the river, photographing and filming its wildness. We are drawn to that which scares us. We watch even though we don’t want to. Even in the current video footage from Japan, there are motorists on the highway overpass who got out of their cars to see what was going on, in spite of the huge danger. I would like to think that I would have floored my car and sped off. But who knows, perhaps it was smartest to stay on the overpass bridge. It seemed to be made of solid cement and to be able to withstand the onslaught of the ocean water, and it was not submerged, at least not at the time point that the video footage was shot. I hope so anyway. The tanker truck that stopped on the bridge remained there. Perhaps the driver understood that there was nowhere to go. That must be the scariest thought of all—that there is nowhere to go, nowhere to run to. The digital age, with the ability to send live footage in the space of a few seconds via iPhones and cell phones generally has brought with it the possibility of literally stepping into another person’s shoes, for better or for worse. We know how they must feel. We see how horrific it is and know what they face. Nowhere to run to—a sobering thought that pulls us out of ourselves for some minutes and makes us see what is happening elsewhere. We are forced to face our mortality. And it is not war but nature that does this to us. 

Some wise words about rivers

I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. — (Edward Abbey)

And I count myself more fortunate with each passing season to have recourse to these quiet, tree-strewn, untrimmed acres by the water. I would think it a sad commentary on the quality of American life if, with our pecuniary and natural abundance, we could not secure for our generation and those to come the existence of . . . a substantial remnant of a once great endowment of wild and scenic rivers. — (William Anderson, Congressman from Tennessee, Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968))

Sit by a river. Find peace and meaning in the rhythm of the lifeblood of the Earth. — (Anonymous)

Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do. — (Brad Arrowsmith, Landowner along the Niobrara National Scenic River, Nebraska)

The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare to let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. — (Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah)

Wild rivers are earth's renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning. — (Richard Bangs, River Gods)

When protected, rivers serve as visible symbols of the care we take as temporary inhabitants and full-time stewards of a living, profoundly beautiful heritage of nature. — (John Echeverria, Pope Barrow, Richard Roos Collins, Rivers at Risk: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to Hydropower)

Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss. — (David Bolling, How to Save a River: Handbook for Citizen Action)

Any river is really the summation of the whole valley. To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part. — (Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley)

What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else. — (Hal Boyle)

There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river. — (David Brower, Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)

You don't need it, but will you take some advice from a Californian who's been around for a while? Cherish these rivers. Witness for them. Enjoy their unimprovable purpose as you sense it, and let those rivers that you never visit comfort you with the assurance that they are there, doing wonderfully what they have always done. — (David Brower, Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)

Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms—the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning. — (David Brower, The Foreword to Oregon Rivers by Larry Olson and John Daniel)

The song of the river ends not at her banks but in the hearts of those who have loved her. — (Buffalo Joe)

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it. — (Chinese philosopher)

We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields, and we ask that they teach us and show us the way. — (Chinook Blessing Litany)

In a country where nature has been so lavish and where we have been so spend-thrift of indigenous beauty, to set aside a few rivers in their natural state should be considered an obligation. — (Senator Frank Church from Idaho, Arguing for passage of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (1968))

In spite of the durability of rock-walled canyons and the surging power of cataracting water, the wild river is a fragile thing—the most fragile portion of the wilderness country. — (John Craighead, Biologist and one of the architects of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act)

The river called. The call is the thundering rumble of distant rapids, the intimate roar of white water . . . a primeval summons to primordial values. — (John Craighead, Naturalist Magazine (Autumn 1965))

A river is the coziest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it. — (G.W. Curtis, Lotus Eating: Hudson and Rhine)

We don't tend to ask where a lake comes from. It lies before us, contained and complete, tantalizing in its depth but not its origin. A river is a different kind of mystery, a mystery of distance and becoming, a mystery of source. Touch its fluent body and you touch far places. You touch a story that must end somewhere but cannot stop telling itself, a story that is always just beginning. — (John Daniel, Oregon Rivers)

If you grew up in the country, chances are you have fond memories of lazy days down by a river, creek or pond. — (Darlene Donaldson, "The River" in Country Magazine)

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop . . . is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again. — (Gretel Ehrlich, Islands, The Universe, Home)

I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be a part of all its tomorrows. This is a kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever lived or ever will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great design of the universe. — (Virginia Eifert)

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. — (Loren Eiseley, "Four Quartets," in The Immense Journey)

Some words from Hans Børli about rivers

"Lytter du lenge til elvene om natta, lenge, er det til slutt som om sjelen gåtefullt minnes sin framtid"

(If you listen to the rivers for a long time at night, a long time, eventually it is as though your soul will mysteriously remember its past).

Hans Børli, Dagene

The night the Akerselva River died

“Nesten alt liv er borte i Akerselva”—this was the front page headline in this morning’s edition of the Aftenposten newspaper. It translates as follows: ‘nearly all life is gone in the Akerselva river’. Apparently one of the pipes in the Oslo water purification plant up in Maridalsvannet developed a crack Tuesday evening of last week that was not discovered until early Wednesday morning. By that time, about 12 hours later, 6000 liters of highly-concentrated chlorine had leaked out into the river and taken the lives of most of the fish, crayfish, and river insects along the river’s approximately six-mile length. Scientists who have evaluated the river during the past week have found no signs of life. River life was annihilated in the space of one night. These are the kinds of headlines that make me want to scream and cry. Scream in frustration and cry from heartbreak. I simply cannot understand how such accidents can happen in 2011, and yet they do. There will be a police investigation and blame will be placed somewhere, but it will not bring back the fish and the other life that died without ever knowing what hit them. I only hope that the many mallard ducks that live along the river, even in the wintertime, are unaffected. I really don’t think I could take knowing that their numbers were also decimated. I feel so sorry for the fish and the other life that died before they had a chance to live out their short lives on this earth, and also for the ducks, because all these wonderful creatures are completely at the mercy of humans. I feel sorry for us too, the humans who love this river, who walk along it in all seasons, marveling at the ducks who tackle the ice and snow and cold, hardy birds that show us that it is possible to survive these winters. I never tire of watching the ducks and the bird life in general along the river. But it’s hard to imagine that the ducks or any of the other birds will stay without food in the river. I dread the thought of what the river will look and sound like in the summertime—empty, lifeless, dead, silent.

What happened to the Akerselva river last week is a tragedy. Our lives go on, but a beautiful living river died in the space of one night. Scientists say that it will take two to three years before the river comes alive again. But right now, all I can focus on is the loss--the immense loss of life. We are not doing our jobs as caretakers of this earth when we let animals and birds die due to chemical spills, oil spills and pollution. They cannot talk, cannot tell us what they need, and cannot tell us that they are sick or dying. So we need to pay attention to them. We need to interpret for them; we need to ‘see’ them, to see how valuable their lives are. We need to ‘see’ so many things. We have to start living as though our lives depended upon the happiness of the lives we have been charged with protecting. Because the reality is that our happiness does depend on this. Without animals, birds, fish and plants, we are nothing. They may provide food for us, but mostly they provide beauty and another way of looking at the world, a better way. They remind us that all life is precious and should be respected. They are a constant reminder that all life is sacred.  


(Some links to Norwegian news articles about this environmental tragedy:
http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/03/08/nyheter/innenriks/miljo/akerselva/forurensing/15728369/
http://mobil.aftenposten.no/article.htm?articleId=4048980
http://mobil.aftenposten.no/a.mob?i=4050464&p=aftenposten)

http://www.newsinenglish.no/2011/03/09/catastrophe-hits-historic-river/

Just give me the facts, ma'am

As many of you know from this blog, I have managed to reduce my TV watching time quite substantially over the past two years. I still do watch a good movie on the cable channels from time to time, but my interest in following particular TV shows, series, or the news has diminished. I would like to blame this mostly on reality TV, and yes, this type of programming has definitely pushed me away from TV. It has infested nearly every major TV channel, both here and in the USA. But my current stance also has to do with the level of credibility concerning news reporting in the media generally, because I have also lost a good deal of interest in newspapers as well. I just don’t believe most of what is presented to me as news/facts anymore. I get irritated by so many things—but primarily by the loss of objectivity in news presentation. I am reminded of what Fox Mulder used to say on the X-files—‘Trust no one”. It’s how I feel about most of the news media these days. They have an ‘agenda’ that they want to push. European and Norwegian news agencies have their agendas, as do American agencies. We could discuss for hours, maybe even days, what those individual agendas are. Suffice it to say that sometimes they’re pushed right up into your face in this country as well as on CNN, so that you cannot ignore them no matter how hard you try. And you can’t stick your head in the sand like an ostrich because the minute you stick your head back up again you’re bombarded with ‘truths’, superficial reporting, politically-correct commentators and people telling you how to think and feel. If you want to make these things part of a debate program, that’s fine with me, because that’s where they belong. But don’t sell this approach to me as objective news reporting, because it’s not. And don’t get me started about the tabloid-like headlines that are supposed to hook me into reading newspaper articles. Even one of the best newspapers in Norway, Aftenposten, has resorted to using such headlines to reel in readers (and advertisers), e.g. in the vein of ‘We love to buy (something or other)’—a folksy approach that just doesn’t work for me on its front page. Furthermore, I am tired of reading and hearing journalists’ opinions about major news stories—just give me the facts please and not opinions. If I want their opinions, I’ll ask for them or even Google them if I need to. But no, it seems as though I cannot find respite anywhere.

I grew up reading The New York Times newspaper, because that’s what my parents read, in addition to the local Tarrytown newspaper that updated us on all the local happenings. But The New York Times was special. It was a real newspaper, with solid, in-depth reporting. The front page was the ‘hard news’ page and you either liked that or you didn’t. But you knew it was there and you knew that the facts were being reported on the front page. I guess that might have been boring to some people. So I decided to check out the front page of The New York Times recently, to see if it was still the ‘real news’ newspaper I remember from my youth. And as far as I can determine, it is, at least from the ‘front page’. That was heartening. But still, I have become so skeptical that credibility and truth are going to disappear at a moment’s notice that my motto remains—‘trust no one’, at least in the context of the news media. I check out many different sources now, newspapers, TV, radio, blogs, and online sites in order to get the ‘complete’ story. So in one sense, the superficial reporting of news has had a positive effect—I now am willing to use whatever time is needed to find truth and credibility, especially if one or two news stories particularly interest me.

Tilslørte bondepiker (Veiled peasant girls)—a classic Norwegian dessert

I made this dessert for the first time last night after living in Norway for over twenty years. I guess I’ve never made it before because most of the time I’ve ordered it for dessert when we’ve gone out to eat. We seldom eat dessert on a daily basis. In any case, this dessert is incredibly simple to make, you can’t make any mistakes with it, and it tastes wonderful. I don’t know where the name for the dessert comes from—perhaps the layering of the crumble and the whipped cream over the applesauce—‘veiled’ applesauce? It kind of makes sense. In any case, try it and enjoy….. I've translated the recipe from a website called MatPrat (FoodTalk). And if you want to see what the finished dessert looks like, here is a photo: http://www.matprat.no/artikler/tilslorte-bondepiker/

Ingredients

3 apples 

6 tablespoons sugar 

¼ cup water 

2 tablespoons butter 

6 tablespoons plain bread crumbs to make the crumble

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 

1 ¼ cups cups heavy cream for whipping

·         Peel and cut apples into cubes, remove the core.

·         Put apple cubes in a pan with four tablespoons of sugar and all the water. Cook until apples are tender and you can mash them. Cool. You can use store-bought apple sauce. If so, then you will need approximately ¾ cup for this recipe.

·         Melt butter and remaining sugar together in a frying pan. Add the bread crumbs and saute well. Season with cinnamon and refrigerate.

·         Whip heavy cream until fluffy.

·         Arrange applesauce, crumble and whipped cream in layers in bowls or parfait glasses and serve immediately.

·         Serves 4 persons

A favorite song by Renaissance--Carpet of the Sun

Renaissance, with the terrific lead singer Annie Haslam (what note couldn’t she reach), was one of my favorite bands during the late 1970s. I got to see them in concert at the Premier Theater (no longer exists) in Tarrytown NY, I don’t remember the exact year, but it must have been around 1978 or 1979. This band produced great songs; many of the lyrics were written by the English poet Betty Thatcher Newsinger. I love her poetry. Songs like Ashes Are Burning, Can You Understand, and Carpet of the Sun made a huge impression on me as a teenager. I can still listen to these songs all these years later and they touch me the same way as they did then. I’m including the lyrics and the YouTube link to the song Carpet of the Sun. It describes pretty much how I feel about spring coming and winter ending. Enjoy!

Carpet of the Sun

Come along with me
Down into the world of seeing
Come and you'll be free
Take the time to find the feeling
See everything on its own
And you'll find you know the way
And you'll know the things you're shown
Owe everything to the day

[Chorus:]
See the carpet of the sun
The green grass soft and sweet
Sands upon the shores of time
Of oceans mountains deep
Part of the world that you live in
You are the part that you're giving

Come into the day
Feel the sunshine warmth around you
Sounds from far away
Music of the love that found you
The seed that you plant today
Tomorrow will be a tree
And living goes on this way
It's all part of you and me

[Chorus 2x]

See the carpet of the sun
See the carpet of the sun
See the carpet of the sun
See the carpet of the sun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upIlhve5r-g

Another little update

I've been playing around with the template design for my blog, trying to find a background and color scheme that expresses the freedom I feel when I write it. But changing these things also represents the changes I've been going through personally and in a work context, so every now and then the blog will look slightly different. They may be cosmetic changes, but somehow they seem important in the moment. I hope you'll bear with me and give me some feedback if you think the changes are too much! Thanks......

Two good sci-fi horror films--Alien and Pandorum

I keep promising myself that I won’t stay up late to watch sci-fi horror films on cable TV because they usually have a negative effect on my sleep. However, they’re not on all that often, so that when they do show up on cable, I’m tempted yet again to sit and watch them. I have been a sci-fi fan for years; the combination of sci-fi and horror started (for me) with the Alien films (four in all), all of which are excellent films due to tight plots and the terrific job that Sigourney Weaver did with her character Ripley in each of the films. And of course HR Giger, who crafted the Alien monster, did a fantastic job of creating one of the scariest non-humanoid creatures to ever inhabit a spaceship. The first Alien film (from 1979) mesmerized me. It managed to depict a claustrophobic, dark, scary and utterly mechanical/soul-less environment onboard the spaceship, which of course made the film very intense to watch. The scene in Alien where one of the crew goes in search of the missing cat in one of the more remote areas of the spaceship has to be one of the most nerve-wracking ever filmed. You know what’s coming, you just don’t know when and you’re not sure what the scene is going to look like. It delivers, as does the rest of the film. The other famous scene is one of the most revolting—suffice it to say that if you haven’t seen the film, you should be prepared for blood and a violent unusual alien birth. The Alien sequels also deliver, surprisingly enough, since sequels are usually never as good as the original film. This is not true of Alien 2, 3 or 4, which are stand-alone films and just as nerve-wracking to watch as the original, with the same measure of claustrophobia and terror.

I was reminded of Alien last night when I was watching Pandorum, a German-American sci-fi horror film from 2009 with Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster. Pandorum refers to the psychological condition of paranoia and hallucination that the astronauts experience due to their being in deep space. The film tells the story of the (remaining) astronauts who are on board a huge spaceship that is on a long journey to the planet Tanis, which they are to settle since Earth has been destroyed. All passengers on board are suspended in bio-chambers (pods) where they can sleep (a kind of dormance) for the long space journey. The spaceship also carries seeds and plants of all kinds that can be used in the creation of a new society on Tanis. But when the astronauts emerge from the pods they have problems remembering their mission, who they are, and what they are doing on board the ship, and they spend a good deal of time trying to figure out what is going on and what has happened to most of their fellow passengers who have disappeared. The film is pretty scary, with the same kind of claustrophobic intensity and paranoia that Alien has, but unlike Alien, its monsters are not aliens. Rather, they’re fast-moving strong humanoid-like monsters that were once human, but which mutated/evolved into monsters due to a combination of circumstances that the film explains nicely. They have been hunting and eating the passengers on board the spaceship that has become stranded on its way to Tanis. One of the major plot ideas of the film is that the remaining astronauts must repair the ship’s nuclear reactor before it shuts down and destroys the ship, and this quest puts them in constant danger as they must battle these creatures on their way to the reactor. You don’t find out until the end of the film what really happened to the spaceship or what has happened to the captain, which is good because the ending is definitely worth waiting for. Pandorum is a very good film on a par with Alien, and that’s saying a lot.

So I broke my promise to myself and watched Pandorum, which brought to mind Alien, and which led to my writing this post. I’m guessing that my life will be like this for a long time to come—loving and hating being scared at the same time and arguing with myself about whether or not I should watch these films. My husband doesn’t like these types of movies; he will always say how unrealistic they are. My father used to say the same thing. I know this is true, but there’s a part of my mind that’s willing to suspend reality so that I can enjoy such films. You either like sci-fi horror or you don’t. I guess I fall into the first category. I’ll write more about some of my favorite sci-fi films in future posts. 

A little update

As many of you know, I write poetry and have been doing so since I was a teenager way back when. I am always sending poems out to different magazines and journals as part of the conventional route to publishing one’s creative work in the hope that one of them might find an editor who likes them enough to publish them. Right now my poem Pardon is in the hands of The New Yorker poetry editor. I am expecting a ‘no’ but hoping for a ‘yes’. Come to think of it, the entire submission process and the involved waiting for a response remind me of academic science. We send our articles to different journals and most of the time they get rejected after a long evaluation period. But sometimes they get in on the first try. So I can hope for that too for my little poem. The New Yorker is like the journal Nature or Science for academic scientists—the best in its field, so that to have a poem published there would mean a lot. But I also have put together a small collection of my poems and called it Parables and Voices. I did this through CreateSpace, which I have written about before in this blog. It is a subsidiary of Amazon and does a great job of letting new authors get a foot in the door, so to speak. The resulting books can be made available for purchase on Amazon and that is pretty amazing. Your book can also be distributed to other sellers for a nominal fee that allows for increased distribution of your book to online sellers and other bookstores. Parables and Voices is available here on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Parables-Voices-Collection-Poems-1973-2009/dp/1452838763/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298989255&sr=1-1

The front and back covers as well as the internal formatting are the work of http://fotoisphoto.com/. I have worked with this company before on my previous book and am very happy with their work. I recommend them.

I am following Malcolm Gladwell’s (the author of Outliers) recommendation—get your ten thousand hours under your belt in whatever field you want to achieve some measure of success. So for me, that means just keep on writing. I am hoping for a little success as a writer. I’ve had a little success as an academic scientist (published over eighty articles as first author/co-author). But I am realistic; I know how competitive it is out there. Just like academic science. Some days I hope for more feedback about my creative writing ventures, other days not. It depends on the kind of day, maybe even on the kind of week I’m having. Basically it boils down to this—can I take yet another rejection emotionally? Between academic science and creative writing, I understand that I will be living with rejection on a more standard basis. I’ve simply got to toughen my skin and keep on trucking. 

Overcoming the 'jantelov'

When I first moved to Norway, I often heard the expression ’du skal ikke tro at du er noe’ (you shall not believe that you are something). It was often mentioned in discussions about successful people or individuals who had achieved something great and how these same people could be ‘put down’ by others in society with this expression. Some of my Norwegian colleagues warned me about the ‘jantelov’, a mentality/behavior that punishes individual achievement or individuals who break away from the pack and achieve success on their own. I found it hard to understand this mentality until I understood that it has envy as its basis. The jantelov is basically envy in action. So that if someone says to you that you should not believe that you are somebody, you can rest assured that they are envious of you and of your achievements, and that you are in fact ‘somebody’. What you can also be sure of is that you have actually achieved something, if you were at all in doubt. And you could be very easily in doubt about your merits in Norway. It can be very confusing to figure out if you have achieved success in Norway because you will seldom hear someone say to you ‘great job’. You will hear that you did a ‘grei jobb’ (ok job), or you might hear that ‘den var god’ (it was good), but the kind of high-fiving, hand-slapping, enthusiastic ‘way to go’ or ‘yippee, great job’ or ‘terrific’ that you might have heard in the USA, you won’t hear here. Often you will not hear anything at all—in other words, no feedback, or you will hear that you could have done a better job or that you could have done it differently. The latter is the most common. The behavior is very confusing, especially when you know intuitively that you have done a terrific job. But the jantelov exists in other places as well, just under different names. There are some people I knew when I was growing up in the USA that would hesitate to praise you or your accomplishments for fear that the praise would go to your head. It seemed to be part of child-rearing for some adults and teachers. So this mentality also exists outside of Scandinavia. But it seems to have been honed to a sharp finish here. If you are the type of person who relies on positive feedback to progress in a job, you will be disappointed. You need to learn to trust your instincts about your successes and to ignore the negative or confusing comments. Not so easy, I can tell you.

What is envy, really? I looked it up in the dictionary and it is defined as a ‘feeling of discontent or covetousness with regard to another’s advantages, success, or possessions’. What then is jealousy? According to the dictionary, envy and jealousy are closely related. Envy has more to do with longing for the success or advantages that another person has, whereas jealousy has more to do with resenting that another person has that success or advantage instead of you. So I guess it’s human to feel envy and jealousy at times. Everyone has been envious or jealous at one point or another. The key is to not let them get the upper hand, because if they do, you end up living your life in ‘reaction’ to the person or people you envy or are jealous of. You will ignore your own individuality and focus entirely on another’s. You will ultimately diminish yourself and your own creativity because you will spend most of your time trying to imitate another person or badmouthing him or her if the former doesn’t work. It is said that ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ (attributed to Charles Caleb Colton) and that ‘flattery will get you nowhere’ (proverb). The latter is the truth. There is no point in imitating another person out of envy or jealousy. If you imitate another person in an effort to learn from him or her at the start of a personal venture, this is harmless enough and may help you on your own path to success. But it hardly pays to do this constantly. For one thing, you will alienate the person you are imitating, and then you will ultimately understand that you lack the creativity and competence to continue down this path. It is a pity that more people don’t realize that they have their own individual talents that are just waiting to be explored, that they don’t have to imitate others to feel important. But sometimes out of fear, people will not explore them because it is safer not to. If you don’t explore them, you can live safely within the crowd, you can maintain your anonymity, you don’t have to stand out. But if you never step outside the crowd, you will diminish yourself routinely and experience more envy than a person who has at least ‘tried on’ his or her individuality, even if he or she has not accomplished great things by doing so. ‘Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all’ is a good motto. So perhaps the cure for the jantelov is to step outside of the crowd more, to be an individual, to let your light shine, to try--and not worry about failing. With all this activity, you won’t have time to be envious or jealous. And that is the key to a happy life, forgetting about what the others think or will think of you, and basking in the warmth of your efforts and small successes in love, work and daily life. 

Oslo winter scenes

Lamplight in snow

Snow patterns

Ice art

Small is better

Many years ago, my sister and my father read a book called Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher. Both of them recommended the book to me, but I did not read it at that time, and still haven’t done so. I could imagine doing so now. It’s taken me an entire work life to get to the point where I viscerally understand that bigger is not better, growth is not necessarily good, and productivity without humanity is soulless and demoralizing. I no longer see the point of huge corporations and conglomerates. I have to admit that when I was younger, I looked forward to joining a large company, to becoming loyal to it, to representing it, and to feeling safe within its walls. I looked forward to becoming part of a corporate family. I viewed small companies or self-driven businesses as risky places to work, because there was no guarantee of a stable income or even of a future. And maybe at the time I began my work career, large companies were stable and humanistic organizations for the most part, but thirty years later, it is clear to me that this is not the case. But considering the employment problems my father had working for large corporations during the 1960s and 70s, I’d have to say that I was just naïve thirty years ago, and thought perhaps that my traverse through the business world would be a much different experience than his was. To some extent that has been true. I have not suffered unemployment the way my father did. But I have experienced firsthand what it is like to be a number in a huge system that does not really care about its employees. I did not end up in the business world per se. Although I briefly considered a business career, science won out and I ended up as a scientist working in large hospitals, first in New York City and now in Oslo. The seven years I spent working for the research institute at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, a private hospital, were among the best work years I have ever had. I was proud to work there and I will always have those memories. I never felt like just a number in a system or like a nameless employee. I work now as a staff scientist in a medical department at a large hospital corporation in Oslo, which became a huge conglomerate following the merger of four separate city hospitals, all of which are public sector institutions at different locations. This was a political directive—of course the politicians know best. I don’t know if the private versus public sector aspect is the major difference between the two hospitals in terms of my experience of them. Both of them are large hospitals. All I can say is that working for a huge public hospital has become an exercise in dealing with an organization that is so huge that it no longer has any overview over individual employees nor does it really care about them. We are numbers in a huge system and we got lost in it a long time ago. The merger of four city hospitals was supposed to improve patient services and care, cut costs, centralize competence to specific areas, and reduce administration. It has not accomplished any of these things. Perhaps it is too soon to try to measure the success of the merger, I don’t really know. All I know is that hospital administration has grown by leaps and bounds. Costs have soared. Everything has gotten bigger. There has been growth. We measure productivity and effectiveness. We write progress reports. We will be required to participate in psychosocial evaluations of our workplace environment that will result in more reports that will be filed with the personnel department and perhaps studied by a doctoral student at some point. When we need to order an item for the lab, the actual ordering process requires the involvement of at least three to four people, whereas ten years ago we could pick up the phone and order it directly or send a fax to do the same (exactly one person was involved, the person doing the ordering). We receive monthly overviews of our budgets now that very few people actually understand. I don’t understand them. Negative values in one column mean that we have unused money and positive values in another column mean that we have spent money. But the reverse is true if we look at another section of the table. My budget deficit grows larger each month due to the fact that money appropriated for my salary has been coming from the wrong account. I have reported this mistake to my superiors at least three times, and each time they have tried to correct the mistake with the accounting department. But the mistake is still there each month. There is growth; my budget deficit gets larger. But I’m not doing anything to make it larger; it’s growing by itself. I’m not ordering anything because I don’t know how much money I actually have anymore. The other day I noticed another mistake, this time having to do with my job classification. I am a scientist with professor competence (since November 2007); this corresponds to competence class 9. I informed my superiors in 2007 that I had achieved professor competence. I should be in competence class 9. But no, I am in competence class 8, scientist with a PhD. This mistake was corrected in January 2011 and then uncorrected in February 2011. No one informed me why it was changed. No one cares enough to do so. I don’t know who to inform about it anymore, since I’m not sure that anyone even cares about a ‘miniscule’ little problem like this. The problem is that a lot of us have been placed in the wrong competence classes and this affects salary levels. No one seems to care. When I was a board member for my scientists’ union, these were the issues I was trying to correct and deal with, until the union leader for the hospital conglomerate decided to harass his board members to the point where half of the board quit, myself included. He worked against us instead of for us. And so I ask, with ‘friends’ like this, who needs enemies? It is yet another example of how the system is imploding.

Everything feels too big now, and all I feel is miniscule. I am insignificant to the system. It doesn’t care about me, and I no longer care about it. I don’t know what it stands for anymore, and I have no idea of its goal. If someone could tell me that I’d be glad. But it wouldn’t change my views. I want a smaller environment now, a more personal one. If I was going to work for another company, I’d want one boss to relate to, not three or four and I’d want to have one name or at most two names of people who could help me when I had a problem or a question. I wouldn’t want to be just a number in a soulless organization. The problem is that I’ve run out of steam. I don’t want to start over somewhere else, unless it was to start my own little company. And it would be a little company. At this point, I’d be happiest being my own boss, maybe working with one or two other people, happily being of service to whoever needed my help. I wouldn’t have to delude myself that my loyalty to a conglomerate would be rewarded, because my loyalty would be to myself and my little organization. Small is better. I’m convinced of that now. It’s better because then people matter. I would matter, the few people I worked with would matter, and that would be enough. Maybe this will happen, who knows. In the meantime, I try in the best possible way to be human in an inhuman system. I help those who need my help. I am honest when asked for advice. I don’t spout the politically-correct rhetoric. I support those who are lower than me in the system. But I wonder what will happen when the implosion is complete. I hope I’m somewhere else when it happens. Somewhere where those around me believe in small is beautiful, small is better. 

Builders of Empires

Men of science

Builders of empires

Politicians to rival

The great ones of past ages

Builders of teams

Basking in the sun of recognition

Built on the backs of peons

Currying favor with society’s princes

Centers of excellence abound

Politicians and communicators

Traversing the universe of universities

Moving out into the beyond

Status-seeking stars

In a universe of black holes

Waiting to pull them into

The vastness of nothingness

Oh men of science

Oh builders of empires

Oh star-seekers

Build your universes

Ensure your legacies

Paula M De Angelis

copyright 2011