Really though. I want to take some of this abundant idle time I now have to catch up on my exciting adventures and beautiful pictures from January and February (thiseulife.tumblr.com). I want to celebrate those wonderful times. But there are some pretty big huge things going on in the world and in my life that I canât ignore before I start posting on that blog even in retrospect. Here we go...
Letâs start with the plan: Maldives -> Switzerland -> Final month in Helsinki -> Malaysia -> Vietnam -> USA -> Ethiopia -> UK -> NEW HOME, where ever that may have been.
Now, a deep dive into the realness that is this year.
2020 began for me with a smear of anticipation and a smidge of apprehension. Of course I was excited to have 100% of my time to my own discretion, no obligations. How could I not be looking forward to new continents and time spent fully dedicated to the most important people in my life? But can you also appreciate how it jangled my nerves to not be secure in an income, and to commit so much time away from some other people I love very much? I was feeling unmoored in the best and worst ways.
It is interesting to write about this now from the perspective of four months. Trying to articulate it even just a month ago in person, to friends, or in writing, to myself, was challenging. I think Iâve captured it just about right here and now though.
Then of course, February turns to March and suddenly I am still drifting, but no longer on a stable platform. I am now in a world that is also teetering beneath me. I did cut my trip in Malaysia short but really the effects of COVID slammed me when I realized this thing did go beyond my trip to one Asia and was going to change the entire course of the year, all those items in the âthe planâ that come after Malaysia. And, to be honest, a pandemic really isnât the only thing, or even the biggest thing, changing the course of my year and my life at this time - itâs just the glaringly obvious one.
I wrote NEW HOME above in âthe planâ because we always knew we were leaving Helsinki in the summer of 2020. Work contracts are up, itâs been almost 4 years (meaning tax breaks are going away), itâs time to move on. The big question, then, has always been âwhereâ? That one got answered for us just a few short weeks ago when it became clear that with family obligations we really needed to be in the states right now - specifically we are headed to Salt Lake City.
Even through my expectations of the wonderful things that will come from living in the states again, how can I pretend that my heart does not hurt so acutely at the thought of leaving Europe. I feel so connected to these places, I feel so much rightness and belonging when Iâm here. From within my worst days, Iâve never once wanted to abandon these cities Iâm so infatuated with.
On that note, we arrive to me today. Here in my beautiful Finnish home that I am slowly and heartbreakingly dismantling... I am basking in the sun and ever changing skies coming in through my bedroom window. I am bemoaning the distance from friends here and closures of favorite saunas and restaurants. I am cherishing the closeness of Tom and Pekoe. I am lamenting each day when I can name where else I might be or who else I might be with. I am revisiting special places, and moments, and people through my photos, through this blog, and through social media and video calls with friends and family.
I am still unmoored. What am I in all of this? How do I honestly evaluate the past through the perpetual lens of today?
Perhaps the bigger question Iâve been trying to answer for a while is what do I say and to whom? About who I am, about what I think and feel, about what I know and unknow and know again.
So many benefits. I believe that ultimately a blend of meat and plant based diets is best for the planet and best for our health. That said, I canât condone current meat farming practices and find it simpler and greater impact to practice a vegan lifestyle myself. I hope that people will educate themselves and come to similar conclusions.
Our company opened up an office in Helsinki 3 years ago and I moved there shortly after to join a team of ~35 Americans living and working there.
Now, our company is expanding to Norway and the team there will be experiencing their first nordic winter... Dark, dreary, and long. One of our office leaders asked me to put together a brief description of how we created a warm and welcoming culture here in Helsinki, this is what I had to say:
Tips and tricks:
1.      Plan evening activities starting between 6 and 7:30 PM. Activities starting earlier feel easy to skip with the excuse of a late meeting. Activities starting later gives you an excuse to nap, play phone games, or work too late.
2.      Plan a few social / out of the house events a week to keep active and engaged. Donât plan no events⊠youâll wallow. Donât plan an event every day⊠youâll burn out.
3.      Make your house cozy and joyful. Itâs tempting to treat your space like it is temporary and want to avoid clutter. THIS IS YOUR HOME, make sure you love to spend time there.
4.      Join classes, workout groups, or sporting teams around the city independent of work friends. Encourage others to do the same. Youâre creating a life here, it can be your own!
5.      On that note, pick up some hobbies youâve always wanted to try â or never even heard of/thought of trying. You DO have time in one year or 6 months to learn to knit⊠or to start basic piano⊠or perfect a kombucha brew.
6.      Itâs fun to host and provide food/drink for friends, but it can also be fun take a little of the stress off by cooking together, asking people to bring dishes to share, and ordering in.
7.      Be active. Regular exercise is one of the very best ways to stay happy in a long winter. Run in the morning, do a workout circuit at lunch, or join a yoga studio after work once a week but MOVE YOUR BODY.
8.      Donât do everything that we did, be organic, find what works for you. Create your own inside jokes and crazy stories. Be creative, be open to all people and experiences, and seek joy.
For the ladies: Regular galentineâs gatherings (waffles required), wine nights (have everyone bring the same type and learn something while you eat and be merry), and clothing exchanges (great for the environment, a laugh, and mixing up the options in your closet). Having a great group of women to rely on for fun and for the tough times can get you through a lot of loneliness and dark evenings. Bring this bond into the workplace with targeted PD fund discussions and podcasts. There are a lot of materials out there and great discussions to be had.
a.      We are successful with these because we aim to include all women in the office and the spouse community. These types of activities are easy to manage with a small group and a larger group meaning no one gets left out and you get a chance to connect with a lot of people without a ton of overhead in preparation or cost.
For smaller groups:
1.      Watch TV together. Sounds silly, but trust me. Find connections in TV shows you like (Handmaidâs Tale and Game of Thrones have proven wildly successful here) and get people together for dinner and a bit of TV. This is a great way to be social but not too social. If you spend every night of the week binging Netflix on your own you might start to feel a little down, watch a few episodes with some friends and a nice meal and you feel a little boost the next day discussing the show or bringing home a new recipe to try.
2.      Play board games. There is a game for everyone, play complex games, play simple games, play games with a lot of pieces or games like heads up. Just play.
3.      Start a soup (or anything else) club. Once a month, a few people come over to make vegan soups. Itâs often a huge mess, usually people are late and/or unprepared for a timely meal, there are not enough spoons to go around, but having 12 laughing, mess making friends in my kitchen with 4 soups bubbling on the stove top never fails to make me warm inside. Whether the dinner conversation is thought provoking, silly, or just plain absurd nothing has done more than soups club to make me feel at home in Helsinki.
Bring the joy to the office:
1.      Celebrate wins and recognize those on your team who have done even little things to support you. Start a clap cup or team award to get the word out there about the great things you and your co-workers do every day.
2.      Take any holiday as an excuse for fun. On Halloween we hosted a contest for best Halloween treat, best costume, and best themed costume/dessert combination. People only had to step away from their offices for 15-20 minutes to enjoy a little break, a small snack, and a few laughs before heading back to work. Families also brought in the kids for office trick or treating! (provide a pumpkin print out or other way to identify which office have candy and are ready to be disturbed by adorable visitors)
3.      Get food involved. Do you like to bake but arenât very good at it. Or are you very good at it and want to start getting the accolades you deserve. Start a yearlong bake off full of puns and brutal honesty. Dr. Gastrolove began with one batch of cupcakes that needed some helpful input to be improved. It resulted in a multi-episode bake off spanning several months and many categories of baked goods.
Bring the joy to the customer:
1.      Learn who your team is. The beacon team had overwhelming success starting each team meeting with a 5 minute culture moment. With topics ranging from âPeanut Butter: An American Love Affairâ to âFinnish Celebrity Jeopardyâ we covered the gambit of mainstream and bizarre American and Finnish culture, and 3 years later we STILL havenât covered everything! A few highlights were when our PT created a âHow to Celebrate Finnish Christmasâ Visio to share with the AMs and ACs on the first Christmas here, or when we made a super bowl feast of snacks to enjoy during the meeting. During the second Christmas, a year after starting the project and still another year until the first go-live we wanted to keep the mood light and draw people out of a long project. We gather a group of our translators, install team, and Accenture consultants to travel around the customer office singing Finnish and American Christmas carols. It was a surprise for the analysts, a little break from work, and a small thank you from our team to theirs for their collaboration and hard work.
2.      Be weird and spontaneous and real. I hated typing out my AM and my name (Rachel and Christina) every time I wrote out an Epic follow up or asked someone to reach out. To save time I gave us a couple name, we assigned ourselves a mascot, and now even our lead oncologist refers to us as âRaystinaâ in official documentation.
Bring the joy to the Community:
1.      Do good. Itâs a bit harder in a foreign country to find where your time and money and care is needed BUT IT IS NEEDED. We asked our Accenture counterparts to help us get involved and they shared with us how to get slots in a red-cross coin drive. A translator who loves to knit and crochet learned about octopuses that could be made for NICU babies to grab onto instead of grasping their vital tubes. Employees sold skills or services at an office silent auction to raise money for an international charity which resulted in over $250 raised and kicked off an office pod cast.
2.      Find out what the locals do. Twice a year in Helsinki, anyone can become a restaurateur. People from the office pooled together and sold hot dogs and root beer floats at the park. Finns loved a Philly dog but were pretty skeptical of the floats, lessons learned for next time. Another big event in Finland is the annual Swamp Soccer World Champions. For the past two summers, we have participated as the only American team theyâve ever heard of. Confusing Finns to no end and to great amusement.
The NOLA-based Nigerian chef likes to serve up a side of political performance art with his food, like charging black and white customers different prices to mirror wealth disparity in America. Brett Martin joins Wey on the road, where he's pushing his food-related instigations even further.
âMission Statement for Safari as a Way of Life: To explore the unknown and the familiar, distant and near, and to record in detail with the eyes of a child, any beauty, (of the flesh or otherwise), horror, irony, traces of utopia or hell. Select your team with care, but when in doubt, take on some new crew and give them a chance. But avoid at all costs fluctuations of sincerity with your best people.â
Iâm smiling because I love that the cootie catcher resulted in a pet name even though you didnât pick it from the catcher exactly!
Sometimes when I think about getting married to you, I try to come up with a catch phrase relating to âgotta paint it redâ and rhyming it with âwedâ... idk maybe Iâll come up with something good, maybe not.
What I have been thinking about a lot is a living together situation. You said to let you know when if I changed my mind again (about which I felt more strongly, not moving out of my apartment or not dealing with the moving back and forth) so I decided to write it in a letter because thereâs a lot of rivers that feed into and out of these thoughts, itâs not an easy thought to think of on itâs own. First, Iâll say that I feel most strongly about not moving. I do think itâs more inconvenient to move my apartment than to continue as we have been. That said I like to speak in absolutely even if I rarely actually feel in them. So if YOU were to say we absolutely canât continue as is and you wonât under any circumstances move into my apartment then apartment wise at lead I would make moving to a third apartment work (of course I would also think that was a ridiculous ultimatum and there would be a lot to say about THAT). All that to say if we carry on as we are now it would work. And if we move into my apartment it would work. And if we moved somewhere else it would work. The fact Is I just want to spend all my night in the same bed as you, and Iâll make that happen however I need to in a way that works for both of us.
Now, keeping that in mind, letâs explore some other thoughts around this more deeply. What do I love about my house? That itâs wholly built and developed by me, of course. It does perfectly represent me. But thatâs not why I have a hard time thinking of you living there, honestly it would be fun to redecorate and work with you to make the space ours. What it really represents is freedom to be who I am, not that I canât be myself with you but that there is also a me without you, and she needs space to make a little bit of a mess and host her girlfriends and own her soul. And the luxury to make my own plans and curate my own life without being obligated to anyone else. Would you say thatâs that true of your home too? Just like that was something I was afraid of when we started dating (becoming a pair instead of individuals to our friends) itâs something I fear when contemplating this next step as well. That compromise in some way is something that is just a pure and absolute fact of being in a relationship and I think we would find the right rhythm, especially if we maintain good and open communication as has been a hallmark of our relationship. Even so, itâs a hurdle in my mind right now that makes this conversation more difficult.
Now I want to highlight the other side to this potential adventure, and the reason why this is an exciting adventure to think of and something I want very much aside from the obvious convenience. It comes back to what I texted you the other day- we are a great team! Together we are silly and we explore and we are more open. Itâs thrilling and I think that living together will just expand our possibilities!
So ultimately, my desire to stay in that exact apartment is about convenience and also it being just a fucking awesome apartment. Maintaining the status quo is ok for me now because it means I donât have to dive head first into the reality of commuting to live with quo. Deciding to move in together- at my current place or in a new place is ok too, because it means a little fear, a lot of change, and so much time to grow with you.
I think if anything weâve established in this letter and in our conversations itâs that I still need time, but Iâm well on my way to the place where I both want AND am ready to live with you. And I think youâre on that path too.
Letâs continue to think about what Iâve said, and you share what you want too, but, apartment wise, when I do decide Iâm ready ready to live with you, Iâll be able to deal with anywhere.
