Home Sweet Helsinki

I have never been a person who prided herself on being busy. Active, maybe. But not busy.

There’s a difference, at least to me. Busy is doing things that are necessary but not at all enjoyable: errands; laundry; cleaning. In a perfect world, I would outsource all that nonsense. But that’s cost-prohibitive, especially in a country that does things by the book and also pays people a living wage. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying that there’s a lot more people cleaning their own floors in Finland and I happen to be one of them.

Active, on the other hand, is being on the go for things you want to do: working out; taking classes; traveling. I love being active, even if the activity in question is entirely sedentary like reading or writing.

Right now I’m not active at all, but I’m terribly busy. I’m in the process of relocating to Helsinki and most of my free time is being spent moving a seemingly endless supply of boxes into a fourth-floor apartment, unpacking them one by one, finding a place to put all the things and then cleaning up the mess. If I’m not doing that, I’m doing something vaguely related, like trying to install light fixtures or painting the bedroom or arguing with Johann over shelving units. Last week, I spent a half hour trying to find a laundry room in the basement of our building, during the course of which I either broke into another tenant’s storage unit or inadvertently found ours. I’m hoping it was the former because the room was still full and I have two full size suitcases I want to put there as early as next week. Either way, the key works, so there’s that.

In between all that I have a day job, which is busy-ness in its purest form. I never cared much about how my employer did or didn’t use the time they paid me for, but now that I am busy in my personal life, I find it more challenging than ever to keep up appearances at work. The revolving door of management just keeps turning and I find myself explaining, time after time, that there’s a difference between “keeping people busy” and doing things that matter. They act like it’s a brand new idea every time and then send me off on the most meaningful of assignments: writing promotional tweets.

All this is to say that time is moving at warp speed. Lately, I haven’t had a chance to do the things I actually want to do. I haven’t been able to work out or finish a book or call my friends or even catch up on my junk TV. I haven’t booked a trip since August. I just got a new styling tool with eight attachments and I have’t even tried out half of them. You may have noticed that I missed two weeks of posts in the past two months—which is something I don’t think I ever let happen before even if I was without a reliable internet connection or half blind or suffering from heatstroke.

I am busy and I haven’t been busy in years and I do not like it. I know it won’t last forever—that eventually the boxes will be emptied and my visa paperwork will be completed and I can go back to normal and “cook” a meal of instant soup and salad while browsing flights to Vietnam. But not today. And not tomorrow either. I’m not sure when, actually, because one of the things I noticed about trying to make a home, about taking a space and fixing it the way you want it and filling it with things you like and sharing it all with someone you love is that you maybe want to spend the majority of your time in it being neither busy nor active.

And that’s a brand new idea to me.

8 comments to “Home Sweet Helsinki”
  1. How cool that you’re moving to Helsinki!

    I agree wholeheartedly about the difference between being busy and active. Lately I’ve felt like I’m selling people nice things on the Titanic. Time to figure out how to spend more of my time on things I find meaningful and less on crappy work.

    • HA! selling people nice things on the Titanic. That’s hilarious. And I agree – my busy-ness isn’t going to last forever, but I’m still just so ready to move on and get back to spending my time in a way that matters. Here’s to less crap and more meaning…

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