Solitary Studies

Last week I finished and submitted to my supervisor another chapter of my dissertation. 

Studying is such a solitary and lonely thing. At least on the doctoral level. It was very different when I studied in Tartu and in Newbold - I always had a group of people around me who did the same thing and who lived in the same rhythm as me. It was especially so in Newbold where we were also living on the same campus. Everyone went to classes in the morning and everyone went to the library after lunch, it was the most natural of life rhythms and you could always feel the peer support. Always. But now I have to steal time from either one of my jobs - and feel guilty about it - if I want to make any progress. No-one knows when I sit in the library, and I don't think anyone cares much either. Just 1,5 weeks ago I had a long study day and a colleague from the church messaged me and asked if I had time for a phone call. I said I was writing my dissertation and that I could speak later in the evening. "Is that the doctoral thing?" he asked. Yes, it's the doctoral thing, the one I am doing for the fifth year running. None of it is his fault, of course, he doesn't need to know what I'm doing or how far I am or am not but these kind of conversations make me feel terribly lonely.

Over the long Easter weekend I managed to write some 4500 words for my thesis. I barely got up from my chair for a couple of days and my kitchen table was covered with feedback forms that I was analysing. The chapter I submitted was 37 pages long - and I think I have finally found my strategy. I just write so much no-one will ever have time nor energy to read the whole thing. It should work!

It's also very interesting, of course. It's fascinating to go through all that feedback I received for my preaching series. There are all sorts of comments and opinions and statistics. And I hope I will be a more knowledgeable preacher once I'm done with my big study.

But I got terribly tired from the writing marathon - mostly because I also had to keep my two job balls up in the air at the same time, both the church ball and the school ball. I've taken some smaller breaks, like this:

or like this, babysitting my niece and nephew:

But my grandiose plan to go straight to the final chapter without catching my breath doesn't seem to be realistic. So I will go to Sweden tomorrow, I will leave my laptop and the feedback forms home, I will unplug, read a good book, spend time with S, do some wedding prep, and enjoy the spring. I think I deserve it. :)

One Hundred Days

It is exactly one hundred days today until the wedding. I know because I keep checking our wedding webpage every day and they have this gadget there that does the countdown. The time has never moved so slowly. Which is another way of saying that I have never waited for anything so eagerly. 

As to the prep, we are doing well. The big things are in place - we have a church and a pastor, we have the place for reception and the toastmaster and the photographer, I have the dress and S. almost has a suit, all the invitations are delivered and program of the church service is put on paper, we have plans for the honeymoon and we have ran around S's apartment with a tape measure, checking if the new necessary furniture will fit in. Just last week I collected an official-looking document from some office where it states that as far as the Estonian government is concerned, I am eligible for marriage. We have done an online course of pre-marital counselling together and we are also doing a face-to-face one with D. H. every time I am in Sweden. Things look good! Things look promising!

There are, of course, a million little things that still need to be done. Some of them I find more stressful, some less. Some haven't even crossed my mind yet and some things we will probably discover only the day before (or after) the wedding. But what is a constant is that I find it great fun to work with S. on this big project - maybe the biggest one in our lives when it comes to event-organising. It's cool to see what kind of preferences we have and what the process of reaching a mutual agreement looks like and how our habits or cultural/family/personal differences kick in.

The funniest and the biggest difference between us, as far as my observations go, is how we approach shopping. It's becoming a bit of an anecdote for us, truly. Because we both have a very peculiar way of doing it. I do it like this:

- I bought my wedding dress... from the first salon I stepped in (it was the 4th dress I tried on and the shop assistant was rather baffled by my decision to buy it right away)

- I bought my bridal head piece... well, it was the first one I tried on

- my wedding shoes... came from the first shoe shop I went to (ok, I had checked out their webpage before that but still)

It is not difficult to guess where our bed would have come from if we had done things my way. It would have come from IKEA on our first visit there. But since we are doing it S's way, things are very different. There is no bed yet (and that's ok because - chech the first sentence of this post) but there are a good number of bed shop visits on our account. S. has a whole pile of printed quotations from different shops to be able to compare prices. And he has done almost academic research on the different materials of mattresses. Whatever we end up having, I know it will be the best thing out there.   

The last time he was here and we needed to look for some things for the wedding and he did not buy them the first time we were in the shop, I apologised to him in advance for all that **** he will see in his life because his wife is quite literally unable to shop for things in a decent manner haha. But it's good to know at least one of us has the ability of buying things reasonably. 

Other than that, there's just impatient waiting. If I could will the time to move faster, we would be living in July already. There are so many things - everything! - to look forward to. There is a whole new reality to create. A whole new home and family. New family traditions. New relationship dymanics (without this cursed distance). There's also a new language for me to learn. A new place and culture to get used to. A new job.

Just one hundred days to go. ♡

Small Kernel of Human Kindness

It’s more than six weeks since the war started and the world has changed so much. Not only the big world but also the small one I see every day. Tallinn looks different and Tallinn feels different. There are some 28 000 war refugees living in Estonia now and most of them, I would imagine, are here in Tallinn. So when you go out on a sunny Sunday afternoon, you mostly hear Slavic languages being spoken around you (my ear does not always catch the difference between Russian and Ukrainian). There are so many mothers and grannies and children, clutching their teddy bears, wandering around the Old Town. A young woman who speaks no English gives me a piece of torn paper on a street that says „Ask for an apartment, Tallinn city council“ and I manage to find the right address for her on Google Maps. There’s a Ukrainian lady who works in our school kitchen now, cleaning the tables and helping out. She always says „Tere!“ in the morning when I see her. I have no idea what she did in her real life before coming here. There’s a young girl who had a flower shop in Kyiv and who happened to be in Poland on February 24th, making arrangements to receive 20 000 tulips for the International Women’s Day in March (it is a massive celebration in the Slavic cultures). She never went back but came straight to Tallinn from Poland (with a toothbrush and two pairs of shirts, I imagine). The supplier in Poland was able to help her somewhat, telling her she didn’t have to receive all of these flowers at once as agreed. Now tulpis by thousands arrive in Tallinn week after week and the flowers that should have been given to women of Kyiv on March 8 by sons and sweethearts and husbands are here, some on my kitchen table. I go to the flower shop every now and then, buying tulips from her and also half-secretly looking at her as if she was a super woman. She isn’t. But by selling them here she keeps paying her employees back home who have nothing to sell. I’ve discovered one educational initiative called The School of Hope where qualified teachers who have fled to Estonia are giving Zoom classes to Ukrainian children here. They run it on a voluntary basis right now and I am regularly donating money so they can pay something to these teachers – my colleagues! They say there are more than 300 children already attending this school. I saw my auntie’s in-laws in church this past Saturday. They had just arrived, sat shyly in the pew when someone translated them my sermon. A granny with two grandchildren. The father and mother had to stay in Ukraine.

Just this morning in the news on the National Radio they said that the Estonian government is working hard on a plan for civilians in the case of war. We don’t have metro so there are no ready-made bomb shelters here. There are no sirens for air raids. There is no system as to where people need to evacuate when they have to leave their homes for good. The plans are in the making now, apparently.

It’s all a bit too much to take in. Not to mention the news with horrific pictures that should have forever remained in concentration camps in 1945. Last week I developed a chronic headache and some people referred me to a massage therapist. I went to see her yesterday and she said my neck and shoulders were very stiff. I try to distance myself emotionally from all the news that flood in every day but the body still reacts to it. The body aches. So I will probably have to go to massage again and again this spring, just in order to function normally and to have this one blissful hour far from Twitter and the evil that we are all staring in the eye.

But there are the other news and colors, too. Just today, scrolling through Twitter feed I happened to see several pictures of little liberated Ukrainian towns where people are on the streets en masse, cleaning. There are some cats who have been able to dig themselves out from the rubble, and they are being greeted with joy. Soldiers taking stray dogs with them because the dogs won’t leave. There are spontaneous „first aid“ centres where people who have next to nothing bring things to share with those who have even less left. And my mind wanders back to a marvelous book I read last spring. It’s Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Grossman is one of my all-time favourites, having been a war reporter during the WWII – an Ukrainian Jew, by the way – with marvelous talent and bravery. And after all the horrors of war that he saw, he still wrote his books, and he said this in Life and Fate: “I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

And these words ring true as I read them through tears. The small kernel of human kindness has not yet been destroyed.