a couple of days ago i was in a human-friendly cafe in a department store here in #stockholm which i love so much.
not the one in the video above, i hasten to add — but the feelings i regularly extract joyously from it are exactly similar …
🙂
it’s a cafe which is human-friendly for several reasons: firstly, the working-conditions which the staff may work to their best in; secondly, the overall atmosphere and decor which are both, without being shouty about it, firmly diversity-welcoming; and then thirdly, the food itself … the salads it sells are magnificent paeons to well-priced and healthy existences.
ok. so.
this post is actually not about the above. not really. it’s more about the #swedish character: the right to allow someone to learn by making mistakes.
and sometimes the “someone” in question doesn’t; and especially if they are not steeped in this deep #swedish tradition of profound reflection: a tradition some — especially from the us, uk, and similar — confuse foolishly with an inability to take decisions in a timely fashion.
in the uk, we usually say no decision is worse than a decision taken poorly. but what we in the uk forget to remind ourselves (oh, and i say “we” so i sound less combative, didn’t you know?) is that to resist even the poor decision because one’s finely attuned #intuition knows that the gold of the matter — any matter! — is still out there waiting to complete a full picture is, in itself, surely, to sometimes involve taking the best decisions history will be able to witness.
so in countries like the uk and the us, when we have ENOUGH data is WHEN we decide.
which is why so often — in respect of nation-building at least (what provoked this post in part), but perhaps civil engineering as just one example, as well as other complex processes in a multitude of sectors, too — enough actually is clearly not enough in historical hindsight.
it may also be a thing of a certain kind of social sensibility. and whilst this is for another post, i do think yes it could very well be. the good right is often patient out of calculation, despite all intentions. the good left perhaps, more resiliently (for my universe), acts out of true compassion.
either way, to know when enough is NOT enough is what the #swedish people, alongside a wider #sweden of institutions and organisations and ways of doing things so particularly, really does manage to deliver on quite superlatively when acting out of its very best instincts.
and so — finally! — to the anecdote: the human-friendly cafe. i saw a mother or carer, a toddler in high chair, and a joyful young girl of perhaps about five or six at a large round table near where i was sat. on the large tables in this restaurant they put red hearts on a sign which gently requests that only parties the size of the table sit there. the community instinct, i think they say (my #swedish still isn’t where it should be), so everyone can sit down who wants to. a jaundiced british eye would say: “footfall, above all …” (but then again, maybe the jaundiced one is me …)
anyways.
one of the hearts on another big round table next to this party of three was in the shape of an ace of spades: the sign had been placed upside down.
i watched from a distance: the young #swedish girl clocked the difference, checked back at her own table, and realised (i sense) what had happened. but then she did something which for me was initially strange — but which, in retrospect, was UTTERLY #swedish: she said nothing to her mother/carer; neither did she choose to change the ace of spades back to a heart; but instead, manifestly, kept the information for herself.
and maybe on another occasion, too, she’d mention it to someone. but at that moment, she chose to reflect further, as the individual she was and saw herself to be.
and this is what the rest of us forget about #sweden when our right trots out its tropes over and over as it does: the #swedish sense of community — even today — is built profoundly on the individual, NOT on a culture of smothering: the individual, that is, as the inviolable building-block of their sense of society.
and sometime this sense is more or less militaristic. but always it is founded on the deepest of respect for the right of each person to go so far as to make a fool of themselves — and then, fabulously, be fully supported into learning how not to in some better future.
above all this: support for the integrity and reality of the inviolable shape of the individual.
this for me is #sweden. and this is how i would like other countries and cultures to see the best of what #sweden still gifts to the world. why? because i would like the rest of us to learn that there is a way forwards; a profoundly good one for us all. not exactly the same way: but as music, reinterpreting itself continuously.
it doesn’t necessarily involve dominating the enemy either, whomsoever our history at any time demands we must thus define it.
no.
not this.
but it does mean that the “enemy” must learn, finally for themselves, as the little girl who clearly is no one’s enemy is now doing every beautiful learning moment of her life, that nothing is irrational; that there is a reason for everything; and that if we think long enough, we will uncover the truth — NEVER post-modern nor relativistic, any more, for sure … — to absolutely all the pain and joy and intelligence and art and science and education and law and medicine and passion and poetry and good faith we just have to yearn for in our both shared and assertively collective future-presents … based, always, as i now demand myself they be, firmly and forever i mean, on the rights and integrities of the individuals we all are: OUR building-blocks.
just this.
ourselves …
mil's page 