Home Grid with Sidebar – Page 2 – Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

Wonder at First Sight

Perhaps the strangest thing about making a home somewhere is how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary. The landscape fades into the commute. People become their roles. Institutions become explanations for themselves. Then someone arrives with an unfamiliar accent, an impertinent question, or delight in something you had stopped noticing—and the world briefly returns in full colour. Such encounters aren’t always comfortable. They may restore something we love; they may change what we can bear to overlook. But I have never wanted belonging purchased at the price of seeing less.

Same As It Ever Was

I went looking for the history of ÅHS and found a repertory company. Think Ålandic Blackadder, with more organisational charts and a remarkably durable cast. Doctors become politicians. Journalists become board members. Each decade brings a change of wardrobe and a cunning plan to resolve the difficulties created by the previous cunning plan. Hippocrates and Montesquieu are summoned to an argument neither lived long enough to regret attending. The lawyers get repeat business. The rest of us get another premiere. Somewhere beneath it all lies a question we have been reorganising for thirty years: how do you get an institution full of people who know better to work better together?

Everyone Can Advise

I may be the only person on Åland untroubled by the missing job advertisement. Why make strangers audition for an occupied chair? What interests me is the resources attached to it, the council assembled to bless it, and the difference between being allowed to do something and exercising good judgment. The recruitment theatre was cancelled. The coronation appears to have gone ahead.

Now Hear It From Me

The story behind the newspaper clippings: five short video clips about my writing, Åland’s government, UN-Habitat, and what happened when I expected to be credited.

The Climb

On my forty-sixth birthday, I see that human life cannot be understood only from where the person is standing now. During the climb, I know the grain of the rock, the doubtful foothold, the salt in my eyes. Then something catches me. I lean back, and the years open into a landscape. Earlier selves, worlds I have come to carry, a life I once lacked the imagination to picture: each changes what the others mean. Where their views meet, I begin to recognise the life that could only be mine. Each of us carries a world assembled in an unrepeatable way, still widening, still coming into view.

Driven to Abstraction

Philosophy finds a place at the kitchen table, alongside somebody’s strongly held views about loading the dishwasher. It should feel quite at home. Most households are already conducting ongoing research into fairness, freedom and the limits of human knowledge, particularly concerning the whereabouts of the scissors. We manage to take these questions seriously without demanding that justice present itself in a measuring jug. Why, then, do we become so suspicious of abstract thought when the household gets larger? A small defence of ideas, before somebody clears them away to make room for something useful.

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