Speeding Up

Life is speeding up again. 

The two-week honeymoon in Estonia was very nice and much needed as a vacation. It was wonderful to unplug, let the days run their own course, sleep and swim and visit cafes. But unfortunately we live in a world where after a couple of holiday weeks one has to become a responsible adult again, earning money and studying and doing laundry and what not. Over the past two weeks when S. has been back to work, I have been slaving away at my computer, writing my dissertation. I have just - five minutes ago - sent the first draft of the last chapter to my supervisor. I have come to the expected and even inevitable phase where opening my dissertation folder on my computer makes me want to vomit. The throwing up phase. I am so sick and tired of it, gaaaah. 

And last week I also started the language course in Stockholm. Why waste time, we thought, and applied for the SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) course right away as we got back from the honeymoon. Now I'm beginning to think it might have been smarter to concentrate on my DMin studies first and let the Swedish wait a little but here we are. So my days look like this - a waaaay too early a start, bus and metro to Stockholm, 3,5 hours of someone speaking at me in pure Swedish, metro and bus back home, a long nap, and dissertation writing marathon. It's a little bit funny and skisophrenic because I go from sentences like "I live in Täby. Today is Monday" to sentences like "The Postmodern rejection of authority bears grave consequences for any preacher who commits herself/himself to the faithful proclamation of the Gospel." It's like there are two people living inside me - one that can't even hold the simplest conversation in a grocery store, and the other one that is pushing to get the terminal degree. Every day I go from one end of the scale to the other. I hope my sanity will not suffer too much from it haha.  

And my work in the church starts on Thursday. It is only 50% but I am already totally worried about where I will find the time and energy to get everything done that needs to get done. I will be preaching my first sermon in Ekebyholm church this coming Sabbath... I think I will need a LOT of power naps in the coming year to make all of this work out.   

But on the lighter and brighter side, marriage is wonderful and we have already reached the impressive anniversary of 5 weeks! It's so much fun to have your favourite person right next to you every day. I know it's early days but I really enjoy riding on this wave of energy and excitement - we do something fun almost every evening. We go walking and jogging, we often go swimming, we have been kayaking and cycling, we have been to the National Museum in Stockholm and sometimes we just eat junk food and watch tv. All of these things can be done and have been done alone but it's a whole different experience when you can do these things together with someone. It is simply wonderful.

Our first shopping trip as a married couple was a couple of days after returning from Estonia and we both got a brand new pair of running shoes and a pair of hiking boots. This is a promising start, I'd say. :)

A boat trip to Sandhamn island in Stockholm archipelago

Testing our new running shoes

Out and about

In the National Museum

The People

Our evening

Everyone who has organised (their own) wedding, knows that the sheer amount of little decisions that need to be made during the last week is so overwhelmingly big that it becomes a bit too much at some point. Even with all the help we got and with all the baffling amount of work S's parents put into the wedding prep, my mind still cracked. The reason - the most common of all reasons - the weather! The time - three days before the wedding. When your mind picks up speed and you get into this almost manic state of mind, and when you happen to get some 5 hours of sleep during the last weeks, then it's just too much to handle. So my anxiety got channeled into the weather canal which in the end meant that I was obsessively checking the weather forecast. Rain. Rain. And the evening three day before the wedding saw some crocodile tears and S had to calm me down because I was convinced that the weather would ruin everything.

Then the first guests started to arrive. (And as a side note - I will be forever grateful for the fact that we didn't just have a wedding day but more like a wedding week because the first guests arrived on Tuesday and the last ones left next Monday - the wedding itself taking place on Friday in between - and we got to spend so many wonderful hours with everyone.) NJ and M were the first ones to arrive from Scotland and as soon as I saw them in between my apointments and phone calls, I knew we were to have some mighty good time together. I hadn't seen NJ for some three years and it meant so much to me to see them there. But the worry and anxiety still remained. 

And then Wednesday evening came. I could see NJ and M spending some quality time on the deck at the lake and I didn't want to disturb them but I had a little request concerning the wedding day and I knew if I didn't ask it there and then, I'd forget again. So I went down to the lake and I asked what I needed to ask but then we got into a longer conversation. And then S came looking for me after a while and stayed there as well and after some time S. K. arrived at Ekebyholm and also joined us. And what had started as "it won't take more than a minute" turned into a couple of hours of the best conversation and fellowship imaginable, and me and S ended up telling the story of how we found each other last summer and there was so much laughter and so much love and so much joy in our being together there. And we ended the evening with a spontaneous prayer meeting and we praised God for His amazing goodness and grace in our lives. And I could almost physically feel the tension and anxiety leave my mind because I remembered again, there and then, what the whole thing was about - it was about spending good time with the nearest and dearest, it was about celebrating life and love and friendships, and no amount of rain or hail or thunder could ruin or take that joy away from us. So I stopped checking the weather forecast, stopped caring about it.

And this is what I remember the most from the wedding weekend - the people. The pure joy of seeing old friends and relatives and family members (and also local church members), from Estonia and Sweden and Finland and Norway and England and Scotland. It meant a whole world for me that they would be there, that they would see our tears of joy and hear our vows of commitment, that they would be a part of the wonderful dinner party (12 speeches in total!) and would celebrate way into the night until we could not celebrate any more and had to get some sleep. And guests showing up to church the next morning, NJ preaching and everyone almost singing the roof off the church building, and then another wonderful meal in the castle and long evening hours with conversations and walks and dad doing his jazz thing on the big piano in the castle... It was wonderful. Much more than I could have ever asked for.  

Oh, and by the way. The weather happened to be perfect on the wedding day, +22'C and cloudy. No-one was hot, no-one was cold, and our photographer had a big smile on her face.

In-Between

I've never enjoyed travelling much. I'm a very nervous flier, I always want to be in the airport way too early, and I can't help but think of all the things that can go wrong. This has resulted in a weird phenomenon - on the travelling day or the day before I go into this mode when the only thing I want is to get the travels over and done with, and I completely stop living in the moment. Time becomes a strange quantity - always counting hours, always wishing I was already on the other side - and stops being quality. Fortunately, as soon as I have arrived in my destination I forget all about it and I can be present again. (Surprisingly enough, I have seen the pattern being broken recently, as I have been able to fully enjoy my time in Sweden without going into my "in-between" mode the day I need to fly back.) 

This is how I feel about life in general right now. I'm stuck in this strange "in-between" time that is becoming increasingly difficult to bear. One life has ended and another one has not yet begun and I am stuck in between those two. Not for long, thankfully; I will fly to Sweden this coming Tuesday. But I find it harder and harder to connect with my immediate surroundings here on an emotional level. Most of my things have been sorted and packed by now (so much dust everywhere!), I've made countless trips to a second-hand shop with my old clothes and books and tea cups. The kitchen cupboards have been cleaned. I've made my last important visits - to Türi (dad + some very good friends), to my cousin in Tartu, to my old violin teacher, to A's mum and 103 (!) year-old granny. A couple of outings in cafes with friends. Had my teeth checked at a dentist this morning. Office desk is almost cleared. Hair-dresser on Monday. Then I'm done. 

And the other reality, as close as it is, is still out of my reach. S. sends me pictures from Ekebyholm castle where his parents are working very hard to get everything cleaned and ready for the wedding. And these pictures make me a little emotional exactly because I can't be there yet. I wish the wait was already over and I could take my suitcase in one hand and my wedding dress in another, breathe in and out and just go. 

Have others felt like this, too? Or am I the odd one? I wish someone wrote a book about this. 

The strangest thing of all is the thought that after next Tuesday I will not have to leave S. any more. Sometimes I tell him jokingly that I've gotten such a lasting trauma from the distant relationship that I will literally never leave him, not even for a day haha. But serisouly speaking, I don't know what it feels like, not to live under the dictatorship of plane tickets or school holidays any more. In that sense, I am looking forward to the mundane everyday life even more than the excitement of the wedding. How does it feel to come home to the same person every evening, the person whose presence you once missed so much it made you cry? 

I don't know if I should make a bigger effort to be present here and now. I'll try tonight. I'll go and buy some cake from our legendary Werner cafe - because I have just received feedback on my dissertation's 5th chapter from my supervisor ("very well written, only some editorial comments"). And maybe by eating the cake, watching Wimbledon and listening to rain outside my window (and not minding all the dust rolls) I can still feel it's worth being here and now, too. 

With A's granny on Sunday

The Lasts

The season of "the lasts" has begun in earnest. 

I first noticed it in mid May, around the time of my birthday. The day after my birthday was a Saturday, and a free one at that. As the usual school tiredness had turned into a full-blown exhaustion by then, I decided to hide at home, not to go to church and not to meet up with anyone that day. But as it happened, my auntie sent me a message in the morning, saying that she would drive by and pick me up after church and that we would go to seaside after lunch. My initial reaction was to say no, let's skip it, I'm simply too tired. But then I realised it might be one of the last times I could hang out with her like this, and to the seaside we went. The day after that, my dad came to Tallinn for our traditional birthday dinner and I had, of course, picked my favourite Old Town restaurant for the occasion. And we celebrated my personal New Year in a place where we had done it for three or four years (I think we missed one Covid year) and it was slightly bittersweet to know that we most likely will not sit in that restaurant next spring any more. 

The school year with its "lasts" is finally ending, and I have even written my official resignation letter. The last classes were sweet. There was some hugging and some chocolate and a few teary eyes as we said our goodbyes. And yesterday, as we had our year-end teachers' meeting, T., who is the head of the grammar and lit teachers' department, came to me and said that she considers my leaving a great loss to the Estonian eduacational system haha. It was very kind and a tad dramatic, coming from such a seasoned and award-winning teacher as her.

This past Saturday I preached my last sermon in Tallinn Central. Again, everyone was very sweet and very sad. :)

The emotions about those "lasts" and these goodbyes are complex but the main feeling, as of now, is relief. I am SO ready to turn a new page, I am so ready to reinvent myself (I think that's what always happens when one moves countries - and if not the reinventing itself, at least the possibility of it), I am so ready to start writing a new chapter of and with my life. And what I also like is the way one systematically reviews every aspect of one's life before such a big move. Like, I've started to sort my books a bit, and to clean my drawers, and to throw out (nay, to take to a second-hand shop) all my old winter coats. And there is something freeing, something exhilirating about this. You open up all the drawers of your life and you sort and pack and chuck out and organise and make room for the new... and we probably don't do it often enough. So as much as I have hated moving and packing in the past (some real childhood traumas here), this time it feels like bringing new light and new air to all the stuffy corners of my little life. 

Just yesterday I was cleaning a drawer and found a whole stack of papers from my infamous and failed attempt at a PhD degree in Amsterdam Free University. I had lecture notes and articles there from 2015. Why have I kept that rubbish there for so long? From 2015?

And this evening I have been sitting on my bedroom floor, going trough a box of books. In between the books there were some old postcards and letter. There was one from S., written a couple of months after mom's death. There was a Christmas card from L. that arrived just a couple of days after mom's passing. Even these corners of life get a bit more airy when you sit and reminisce and think about the sheer goodness of people you have had and you have now. No, we don't do this kind of opening and closing and remembering nearly enough. 

I'm planning to go to Tartu this Friday. There are some cafes that I still need to sit and read a book in. Some streets that I still need to walk down, remembering the years lived in Tartu, and remembering my dearest A. Some moments that I need to take to say goodbye to my favourite town in the world. And then - let the new come!

But here are some moments from my birthday weekend:

The 5th graders wrote me a whole birthday book!

My aunt's creation

I know what you're thinking. But no, they were from my little brother. :P

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.