It’s a pretty simple idea: an invitation to learn how to put together simple sentences in Finnish. We’ll explore from the beginning, but with a twist!

I was 14 years old. Our guidance counselor assigned us a research project/interview on a profession we’d like to pursue. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I liked animals, so I interviewed a family friend who was a vet. As our interview came to an end, I asked him my last question with innocent enthusiasm:
“So…what advice do you have for someone who’d like to be a vet?”
His answer: “Don’t.”
I get a lot of advice. Some of it solicited; some of it unsolicited. This was probably the nail in the coffin of my veterinarian career, but in hindsight, I think that choice turned out to be okay. Nothing lost there.

We’ve all been there – stress, uncertainty, confusion – it doesn’t always take much but we manage to get lost in our heads and complain to anyone who will listen, while closing our eyes to the rest of the world. In today’s post I share one of my favourite quotes and explain why it’ll easily remind you to take your head out of your own butt (in a nice way 🙂 ).

Time travel is an unreliable form of transportation. When we look at our pasts, we don’t experience them exactly as we do while remembering them now, from the comfort of the present. But today I wanted to time travel back to 2010 anyway, in light of my birthday having just passed, in order to see what I could piece together from that time.

The first time I picked up a Finnish book, I decided I would read the whole first page. It was 2009, I knew about a dozen Finnish words, and the only ones I understood from that page were ‘on’ (is) and ‘yö’ (night). And on it went from there! It’s easy to get boggled down in the glass half empty mind-set…