I like living in Åland. November would prefer I prove it. The sun has reduced its involvement, my children have demolished their Halloween candy, and the weather has ruled out sending them outside to burn it off. Thirteen years after leaving America, I still miss the shared anticipation of Thanksgiving. I am grateful for the life I’ve made here. I simply have questions about how much gratitude can reasonably be expected under these lighting conditions.
I have spent the week complying with deadlines, that quaint arrangement in which a date arrives and something is expected to be finished. Public writing had to take a back seat. Having finally resurfaced, I turned to the Sustainability Council’s anniversary minutes and discovered an altogether more accommodating relationship with unfinished business. In the party games of public participation, everybody can be involved without necessarily being allowed to interfere with anything. After ten years, the interesting question is what membership enables people to change, beyond their afternoon plans.
There are people whose ethos reach us through a sentence, from many miles away, long after they claimed it. Since this summer, Wendell Berry has been keeping me company. Others may leave a garden, a footpath, a stubborn patch of green that might so easily have become something else. In today’s world, we may struggle to remember that we inherit more than what has gone wrong. We also inherit what humans before us loved enough to keep. So with Berry in mind, I’m trying to think more about life’s quieter bequests. The places that still make room for us. The words that arrive at just the right time. The care we never witnessed, but whose consequences we are able to enjoy. What would it mean to recognise this inheritance while it is still alive, and leave something living in return?
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.
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.
