Outlandish

”You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King I’m not a big consumer of inspirational quotes. I find life itself so inspiring that I don’t need quotes to spew evident facts about life to me. But sometimes even I come across quotes by influential people that hit a spot in my mind. Usually those quotes have a point that might not open up unless you’ve seen more of life than just the never-changing streets and people of your home town. One such quote was the above example from a legend that is the one and only Martin Luther King. In his life he cultivated multiple spot-on and brilliant sentences but this struck a cord with me especially. Why particularly? Because I know exactly (both figuratively and literally) what it feels like standing at a foot of a staircase looking up and not seeing where it ends... If it ever ends.  One such staircase I met in Paris when we started climbing up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and anot

Listing your highlights from the past year is a common practice for social media users around the globe when the year is nearing its end. I encountered this question as early this year as October and it got me thinking... The years when I have actually achieved a lot (moving abroad; getting a job in a huge, international company; achieving a long-time dream, etc.) I never acknowledged those achievements much. Personally, of course, I was aware of what had happened and been done but I didn’t shout about it publicly. On the other hand, the few years that have truly been the most trying in my life so far I have mentioned. Usually in a form of a prayer or a heart-felt wish that the next year would please be better. So far I have gotten that wish... Most of the time. But honestly, how your next year turns out to be depends a lot on how you embark on it; do you start the year with the Finnish mentality ”it’s gonna be just as shit as the last one, nothing ever changes” or do

As a blogger it is vital to keep the posts coming regularly; the more often the better. Search engines and their algorithms raise active blogs in search results higher than those that are rarely updated. But the fact is that nobody can be creative 24/7. Creativeness has a nasty habit of appearing all of a sudden and then you are overwhelmed with ideas of what to write or say, what kind of photographs you should take for each blog post, etc. And then, just as suddenly, follows the period of emptiness when you can’t think of anything to say, no matter how hard you try. Creative people have different ways of dealing with the sudden peaks and lows of creativity; some write notes and make schedules, others just get to work, open a document and start spewing words onto it, or grab their camera and run outside to look for scenes to capture. I find the latter practice to suit me better. When I get an idea I have to materialize it immediately, even if it’s just one sentence. I