On Sisu, the Baltic Sea, and Learning How to Fall
Yesterday was an off day for the Dallas Stars when it came to talking to the media. It was also a travel day for many of us, as the trip from Helsinki to Tampere is over two hours by car, judging by my careful adherence to the speed limit yesterday evening.
As it happened, the team took a train up to Tampere, after which Roope Hintz kept his promise and took his teammates to eat at Hook, a wing restaurant the Helsinki version of which I happened to eat at before the Jokerit game on Tuesday. I will report back to you if anyone has wildly different views of the wings that I did, but for my part, they were good wings for eatin’.
POV: We gave the boys a camera for the train ride to Tampere #NHLGlobalSeries pic.twitter.com/uLtf15VvWo
— Dallas Stars (@DallasStars) October 30, 2024
But before driving up to Tampere, I joined a cadre of media folks who were graciously treated to an afternoon at Suomenlinna, a UNESCO heritage site off the southern coast of Helsinki that is famous for being a fortress held, at different times, by Sweden, Russia, and Finland. Today, it harbors a prison, a beautiful church (where Panthers’ Assistant Coach Tuomo Ruutu got married), and plenty of tourist attractions, including a delicious restaurant where we all had lunch.
We were ferried over to the island by Kari, the boat captain, then after lunch, we were led on a short walk across the island by Sara, our guide. During the walk, we began to talk about the afternoon activity I was most looking forward to: a floating sauna on the lower deck of the same boat, combined with a plunge into the Baltic Sea after dropping anchor.
Saunas were one of the first things I remember the Stars’ Finnish players bringing up when asked a couple of weeks ago about the itinerary for the trip. But as the time approached, I began to hear more about the virtues of combining the sauna with a plunge into the Nordic waters that permeate Finland.
Stank and the Sea
The boys spent last night at a local sauna, experiencing Finnish culture, even jumping in the frigid Baltic Sea #NHLGlobalSeries pic.twitter.com/koWCk0WIH3— Dallas Stars (@DallasStars) October 29, 2024
Saunas are fantastic, invigorating places that I’ve enjoyed before. But the idea of maxing out your body temperate right before forcing it to plummet seemed a little crazy, something for thrill-seekers or professional athletes to do just to prove they can. It didn’t exactly entice me.
And as we walked around the fortress island, it was interesting to hear folks bring up a sense of dread about the experience. I could feel it myself, in fact. It’s like when you go to the beach on a brisk day, and you know that you’ll be okay once you’re in the water, but the agonizing thought of the water’s creeping up your legs and your swimsuit is almost worse than getting a shot at the doctor’s office.
As a child, I remember when my family would stay at a hotel, we kids would always want to know if the pool was heated. They rarely were, but it always seemed like the lap of luxury to swim in a pool that spared you that initial chill. So even as an adult creeping towards middle age far too rapidly for my liking, the idea of jumping into the Baltic Sea not just for a thrill or braggings rights, but for a deeper, more positive reason was a tough thing to grasp. Eventually, I decided to just put it out of my mind until the time came to make the decision about whether to jump in.
***
One word you will come across in even cursory research into Finnish culture is sisu. It’s a word that can mean anything from stoic determination to fortitude to resilience, but more than any single one of those. It’s a word unique to Finnish culture, and one that (if my own cursory research is correct) really began to rise in the popular vernacular after the Winter War with the Soviet Union in 1939/40. One can certainly see the logic behind attaching a cultural identity to the fact that this nation could resist far longer than most would expect, that the Finnish combatants were able to situate themselves in temperatures 40 degrees below freezing while frustrating the progress of the otherwise daunting Soviet army.
It is very common to look to military events in order to compose a national identity. And certainly character is revealed during hardship, as anyone who has begun dating a seemingly wonderful person discovers the instant the other person throws a tantrum at the first sign they might not get their way. There is a reason, after all, that the word “apocalypse” means “revealing” or “uncovering.” The truth about ourselves becomes most evident when comfort and safety are nowhere to be found. No atheists in foxholes and all that.
But when it comes to sisu, I think it might be a disservice to draw too close of a parallel to its military links. Because if there’s one thing I feel confident about saying based on my week in Finland so far, it is that Finns do not go out of their way to be comfortable. The showers don’t tend to get as hot as they do in the U.S., and all of the bath towels I’ve seen thus far (in only four different locations, I grant) come with these great little built-in fabric loops, basically the towel equivalent of the loop in the collar of a coat. This seemed to say, to me, you will use this towel again, and this will dry it most efficiently, because why would you use a fresh towel every time? Even the Finnair flight encouraged passengers to re-use their cup, as it was the only plastic item of the entire meal service. Rather than wasting your cup or wadding up a towel, just go a little bit further to make things a little bit better. You can handle it.
I’m aware of how much of a reach this is, just so we’re clear. To draw sweeping conclusions about a culture from one trip is to embody the worst sort of stereotype of American travelers, and I’m constantly fighting this instinct within myself. But all I can do is to talk to people who live here, and listen to them. And to read what they say about sisu, like this:
The most prominent part of the conceptual core of sisu is the ability to surpass one’s preconceived limitations by accessing stored-up energy reserves. Sisu is invoked by adversity and is more about finding energy in the moment than about long-term endurance, goal-setting and achievement. Instead of being about conscious willing or mental fortitude, it implies a strength that is connected to the visceral and somatic dimension of human endurance.
Excerpt from Emilia E. Lahti’s “Embodied fortitude: An introduction to the Finnish construct of sisu“
This is something I very much resonate with, particularly with regard to its not being linked to goals or achievement.
In my time working in education, some of my colleagues and I would frequently bemoan the misconception by parents or teachers that children needed to be “rescued” from hard situations, that they needed to be saved from the struggle or spared the consequences of their actions in order to preserve the bliss of childhood.
Our experience as teachers and administrators, in fact, was quite the opposite. While we of course did our best to spare undue suffering among the hundreds of children in our care, the kids who were happiest were, invariably, the same kids who had learned tough lessons, who had been taught that they could do hard things and survive. It was no coincidence, I quickly learned, that the children most prone to cheating on a test were the ones who, prior to the tough exam, had rarely had to study in order to pass previous tests. Almost all of the kids I encountered who decided to cheat had never received a lower (or even middling) grade, and so when they were faced with a subject they weren’t naturally good at (a teacher who loved them enough to give them an honest grade), some of them wouldn’t be able to handle it, and they try anything in their power to get the grade they were used to getting.
And even then, the opportunity to learn more from the struggle was there, but not a guarantee. Some parents would try to rationalize their child’s behavior, claiming the teacher had it out for that student, or that giving them a zero on the entire exam was “too harsh.” But many parents understood that now was the best time of all for a child to learn this lesson, to understand how it feels to leave integrity behind and have to reckon with that choice in the harsh light of day. The wisest and most loving parents and teachers wanted the child to embrace the frigid waters of their own dishonesty in order to steel themselves against the temptation in the future, that they might better understand themselves, and be better for it. And despite the initial despondence of an otherwise successful student having to come clean about something shameful, there was (and remains) a very deep joy in seeing those students in the following years, working hard and understanding that they can do hard things without taking a shortcut.
Sisu is much more complex than just integrity, of course. But the question remains: what lies within me to jump when I’m standing on the deck and the pool isn’t heated? What keeps me sweating in a sauna that is far, far hotter than even a Texas summer, and not looking for an iced latte and air conditioning to take away the discomfort? What can we do to give ourselves a resource to draw from when we stare the prospect of failure and inadequacy square in the face, knowing we need to press on anyway? The answer isn’t always a cognitive understanding of the benefits of struggle. Rarely, in fact.
This, right here, is one of my favorite pictures from my trip so far. I was walking to the team hotel in Helsinki on Monday night for the first media availability of the trip, when I happened to see children on a playground. If you look closely, you can see a girl in a pink jacket lying on the ground. She had just fallen from the top of the sprawling jungle gym thingy above her, and she took a second to lean back into the leaves before jumping back up to continue climbing around. This was clearly a child who knew how to fall, which is the best playground safeguard of all. And there’s only one way you learn how to do fall.
Likwewise, there’s only one way to learn how to jump into a nearly-freezing Baltic Sea without the terror preventing you from doing it. You just have to do it, and then do it again. The safest way to jump into unknown waters is to get to know them as well as you possibly can.
So, following Sara’s lead, that’s what a few of us did. And then we did it again.
Thanks for reading, y’all. If Tampere is even half as great as Helsinki, then my bill from this trip will be worth it at twice the price.