Attached to people, not places

My fiancée commented once that I was probably more "international" than she was (if there is such a thing) even though she has lived in 3 other countries besides her own, and in my case it's one less. I wouldn't mind moving from country to country that much, as long as the job is interesting, the pay and the quality of life are good and we are together (which of course entails her filling her requirements list as well). However, she referred to a valid point: I'm not attached to the places themselves anymore, but to the people in them. A place is just nature, buildings and maybe a nice view or two, but the people I know (and the people I love) are really what is important.

One example are my feelings to the place where I was born. Even though I consider myself to be healthily nationalistic I don't have an urge to go back and settle there, but just to see my family and friends. The same is the case with Finland. I'm very grateful for my experiences there, but it's a place as good as any, what is important are the friends and family there. Belgium is the same story: if it fills the criteria detailed in the first paragraph I'd stay after my studies are finished, otherwise I'm willing to search for something somewhere else.

The problem with freedom, as a friend says is that "you don't know what to do with it". I hope that's not my case.

Te, ystävät ja perhe, olette sitä osa Suomesta että minä rakastan

Ja josta syystä kaipaan Suomea. Nähdään pian!

I admire our grandparents

One point brought home from another of the speakers at the CWF is the fact that people of our grandparents' generation (65+ years old) have already gone through very big changes in the world, something that I don't think we recognise often enough. If your grandparents are old enough, they saw the introduction of radio, TV, trans-atlantic travel, the Second World War, decolonisation, the European Union, the nuclear bomb, the massification of the automobile... without even talking about microwave ovens, immigrants from different parts of the world, computers and the internet... If you take into account that the rate of change is much faster now than when they were your or my age, you can only come to the conclusion that the world will be even more drastically different when we reach their age.

If there's people over 70 wathching pictures in Flickr and doing their banking over the internet, that's the kind of person I want to be when I'm their age, and I understand why not everybody can be like that (there's also cultural issues of, say, uncertainty avoidance involved which they are not responsible for, among many other factors). If at that age they still take the world at face value and enjoy what they do, that's the person I want to be. So if you agree with me spare a thought for your parents and grandparents and give them your love and respect. Probably a hug would be nice too.