flourishing – Page 2 – Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs

Of Cows, Commitees and Kaffeklubb

You can take my coffee from my cold, dead hands. However, the committee structure is negotiable. Flourishing is not permanent happiness. It depends on time, access, trust, useful work, somewhere to belong—and institutions that do not consume more human energy than they return. With a cow in the parliamentary record and fika inexplicably under fire, I explore what it would mean to take Åland’s ambition seriously. Perhaps we could start by making a good life less work to arrange.

Thirteen

Thirteen years abroad today, and my life elsewhere has reached its adolescence. It has some questions about the promises it was raised on. How can a place become so much of who you are while remaining unsure what to do with you?

Customs to Declare

Where I grew up, toughness included turning up when someone needed a hand. In the Nordics, I found beauty in making that care a public promise. I want a society that offers both without making obedience the price of belonging. Perhaps steel, smoke and social democracy have more to offer one another than either of my homes suspects.

The List

The autumn equinox arrives with a checklist. Naturally, I have supporting documentation. Beauty, fierceness, care, reckoning: a little personal accounting as the season turns. Loving balance and possessing it are, apparently, separate boxes. And the woman who thinks so much about what makes a life worth living would quite like to live some of it, thank you.

Conduct Your Blooming

Apples, onions, children, and a bucket of dahlias. My worries came home with us, too. As I approach forty-six, a harvest afternoon and the words of Gwendolyn Brooks bring me back to the question of flourishing: what we gather, what we give one another, and what keeps opening in an imperfect world.

flourishingA collection of 23 posts