100 Things My Parents Taught Me

I've compiled a list of one hundred good things my parents taught me over the years, either consciously or unconsciously, by word or by setting an example.

25 things my Mother taught me...

1. how to cross-stitch
2. to think about the meaning of words
3. about generosity
4. to ask questions
5. how to give someone a massage
6. how to get the thread through the needle
7. to listen to music
8. how to iron clothes
9. how to drive to Siuntio [a town near Helsinki]
10. how to clean the bathroom
11. how to wash dishes
12. to appreciate Bev Doolittle's art
13. how to use a baseball glove
14. to remember to take my key
15. how to make a snow man
16. to drink coffee with chocolate cake
17. how to tell the (digital) time [TV guide]
18. how to eat with chop-sticks
19. how to make my bed
20. how to decorate a Christmas tree
21. how to floss
22. to bring my friends over
23. to ask for big things [virtues] in prayer
24. nine ways to pronounce "Caipiroska"
25. how to fill up the gas tank

25 things my Father taught me...

1. how to hunt for wild game
2. how to fish
3. about the effect of a sincere apology
4. how to gut a rabbit
5. to enjoy a sauna
6. that there's no need to cuss
7. how to paddle [canoe, not rowing boat]
8. about simplicity [economy wise]
9. to not talk to my children about their mother disrespectfully
10. how to tie my ice-skates
11. how to drive a tractor
12. to eat porridge
13. to drink coffee with sandwiches
14. how to light a fire
15. how to weild a knife
16. to tell jokes [alas!]
17. how to say "shithead" in sign language
18. to pray behind closed doors
19. how to use a chainsaw
20. that Alabama is a state
21. that water expands as it freezes
22. not to stress about money
23. that relatives are always welcome
24. how to use the laminating machine
25. how to tie a tie

25 things they both taught me...

1. to foster an interest in and a respect for nature and animals
2. about the importance of a personal relationship with God
3. to talk about things
4. to taste everything
5. how to play the piano [I wish!]
6. about the magnificent sport called ice-hockey
7. to apply for jobs
8. how to read
9. to enjoy reading books
10. not to measure things in money
11. to enjoy watching "funniest home videos"
12. to drink with moderation
13. to enjoy traveling [wasn't very difficult]
14. that God can do miracles
15. how to properly pack a suit-case
16. creativity
17. an appreciation of the American Indian culture
18. to prefer public transportation if possible
19. to take care of personal hygiene
[20-25]: Looking forward to see what these will be!

25 advices I should've listened to...

1. "Don't slouch." [tall man's problem]
2. "If you have nothing good to say, don't say anything."
3. "Go to sleep."
4. "Get up early."
5. "Stay away from porn."
6. "Don't take more than you can eat."
7. "Get off the computer."
[8-25]: I can't remember, I wasn't paying attention.

(Next post: 100 vices my parents taught me ... just kidding!)

Top Gear: Mika Häkkinen as Driving Instructor

This was brilliant. Mika Häkkinen, the two time F1 world champion, taught James, the co-host of Top Gear, how to race. Watch clip (11 mins): link here.


I laughed so many times. Mika and James' dialogue is hilarious at times. Here's an example.

James [in the passenger seat]: "Are you thinking through these corners or do you just feel it and you know?"

Mika [behind the wheel]: "No. Honestly what's going on is that we are going really, really slowly."

James [in disbelief]: "Are we?"

Mika [as serious as a Finn can be]: "Yeah."

There's only one disclaimer: in Finland we don't drink "hot raindeer blood". Otherwise the analysis was quite accurate. Enjoy the clip!

Virtuous Leadership

Updates on two Virtuous Leadership related projects:

(1) Virtuous Leadership blog

The blog Hyvejohtajuus (Virtuous Leadership in Finnish) a couple of good friends and I launched a little over a half a year ago is doing great. We can see from the visit statistics that readership is steadily growing. At start it was mostly our friends and acquaintances. Now, more and more people are finding it, and, what is important and encouraging, they are returning to it every week (the articles are published weekly).

We have four regular contributors - an economist/lawyer, an engineer, a political scientist/business major, and a theologian - and a monthly Guestbook-article is written by specialists of various fields. The articles, both the regular articles and the Guestbook-articles, deal with leadership and ethics in various fields like economics, family, education, politics, religion, and - perhaps most importantly - the ordinary life.

The articles are in Finnish because we want to promote discussion in Finland and in Finnish (virtue ethics, though ancient wisdom, is not familiar to the Finnish society at least as far as terminology goes).

Here's a few published topics: "Marketing - Virtue or Vice?", "On Forgiveness", "Disturbing Fatherhood", "The Secret and Gift of Joy", "The Profile of the Healed", "How To Strengthen Virtues?" etc.

We have some extremely interesting Guestbook-articles coming up. I personally can't wait.

(2) Virtuous Leadership translation project

Alexandre Havard's Virtuous Leadership is being translated into a dozen or so languages, Finnish included. I've been lucky to be a part of the Finnish translation team.

The translation has been ready for some time, but we want to make it perfect so we've been proof-reading it over and over again.

Let's see how things take off. I'm very optimistic. Virtuous Leadership is a jewel, but we want to pass the blessing around so that everyone can benefit from it.

December Departure: Dar es Salaam

(Sirkku and Danny, Helsinki 2008)

It's official now. I'm leaving to Tanzania on the 3rd of December. I already bought the tickets. I'll be back in June. The idea is to study hard (in December I'll know if my dissertation research plan is ratified) and spend time with Danny and Sirkku and their kids.

I'm very excited! But organizing everything before I leave is going to be challenging. I'd happily meet with anyone who wants to have coffee before I leave. Just call or drop me a line.

Big Brother Joshua

This must be one of the cutest photos of my nephew, Joshua. The little baby seems very content, wrapped around both a warm blanket and Joshua's caring arm. Joshua even dressed him/her in his old baby outfit, a camouflage body that has "You Can't See Me" in yellow. One can tell that Joshua is himself surrounded by loving parents and family. How else could a two-year-old read this adorably?

Curiositas vs. Studiositas

Escapism: a topic I've been thinking a lot of lately. The temptation to escape reality is almost inescapable. It takes a thousand and one forms. Most people can detect and name their most common way of escaping reality. But for some, it is almost unconscious. Perhaps a lot of our TV and Internet activity (emails, Facebook) - and even reading, whether book reading or magazine browsing - comes down to this.

Below is a very long quote from Josef Pieper, a German Christian philosopher, who passed away a few years ago. He wrote a lot about virtues. This passage includes a lot of longish and difficult sentences, but it really merits careful reading. In fact, I've printed it out and laminated two copies as bookmarks, one of which I gave away. That way I can meditate on it more thoroughly. I strongly recommend thinking about it.

There is a lot of hidden wisdom here. And surprising insights. What parts speak to you specifically? I at least found a few sentences that were incredibly meaningful.

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[The original meaning of sight and its distortion]

There is a lust for seeing that perverts the original meaning of sight and casts a person into disorder. The meaning of sight is the perception of reality. However, the “lust of the eye” does not seek to perceive reality but rather just to see. Augustine notes that the “lust of the palate” does not attain satisfaction but only results in eating and drinking: the same holds true for curiositas (curiosity) and the “lust of the eyes”. In his book Sein und Zeit (Being and time), Martin Heidegger says, “The concern of this kind of sight is not about grasping the truth and knowingly living within it but is about chances for abandoning oneself to the world.”

[The root of the distortion]

The degradation into curiositas of the natural desire to see can thus be substantially more than a harmless confusion on the surface. It can be the sign of one's fatal uprooting. It can signify that a person has lost the capacity to dwell in his own self; that he, fleeing from himself, disgusted and bored with the waste of an interior that is burnt out by despair, seeks in a thousand futile ways with selfish anxiety that which is accessible only to the high-minded calm of a heart disposed to self-sacrifice and thus in mastery over itself: the fullness of being. Since such a person does not truly live out of the wellspring of his being, he accordingly seeks, as again Heidegger says, in the “curiosity to which nothing is closed off”, “the security of a would-be genuine ‘living life’”.

[The effects of the distortion]

The “lust of the eyes” reaches its utmost destructive and extirpative power at the point where it was constructed for itself a world in its own image and likeness, where it has surrounded itself with the restlessness of a ceaseless film of meaningless objects for show and with a literally deafening noise of nothing more than impressions and sensations that roar in an uninterrupted chase around every window of the senses. Behind this papery facade of ostentation lies absolute nothingness, a “world” of at most one-day constructs that often become insipid after just one-quarter of an hour and are thrown out like a newspaper that has been read or a magazine that has been paged through; a world which, before the revealing gaze of a sound spirit uninfected by its contagion, shows itself to be like a metropolitan entertainment district in the harsh clarity of a winter morning: barren, bleak, and ghostly to the point of pushing one to despair.

[The heart of the problem; a "summary", if you will]

Still, the destructive element of this disorder, born out of and shaped by illness, is found in the fact that this disorder obstructs the original power of man to perceive reality, that it renders a person unable not only to attain his own self but also to attain reality and truth.

[The cure]

If, therefore, a fraudulent world of this kind threatens to overrun and conceal the world of reality, then the cultivation of the natural desire to see assumes the character of a measure of self-preservation and self-defense. And then studiositas (diligence) means especially this: that a person resists the nearly inescapable tempation to indiscipline with all the power of selfless self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life against the pressingly unruly pseudo-reality of empty sounds and sights---in order that, through and only through this ascetism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence.

--Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, pp. 39-40

Interpreting New Experiences

The other day my mom was taking care of little Joshua. At one point she took Joshua with her to the car wash. Upon returning Joshua home, the following exchange of greetings took place:

Cathy: "Hi Joshua! What did you guys do today?"

Joshua: "I was in a dish washer!"

Kalevi Lepojärvi: The Funeral

My Grandpa's funeral was in Kemi, Lapland, last Saturday. On our way there Danny, my brother, explained to Benjy, his three-year-old son, what was going to happen, what a funeral was. Benjy listened carefully, and concluded:

"So we are going to have a party because Vaari's dad [Grandpa's dad] went to heaven?"

"Sounds about right," Danny replied.


Above are my grandparents' eight children, my aunts and uncles and my father, standing beside their father's grave. From left to right: Tommi (42 yrs), Tarja (47), Mervi (45), Martti (60), Sakari (54), Antero (56), Seppo (59), and my dad, Markku (50).

Is Richard Dawkins Still Evolving?

Two first-rank Oxford scientists, Dr. Richard Dawkins (atheist) and Dr. John Lennox (theist, Christian), debated Darwinism in Oxford two weeks ago. Dr. Lennox, a kind grand-father type figure, challenged Dawkins on his own scientific grounds. Astonishingly, Dawkins - for the very first time - said:

"A serious case could be made for a deistic God."

Melanie Phillips, a Spectator columnist, listened to the debate and interviewed Dawkins after it. "Is Richard Dawkins Still Evolving?" is the topic of her article. She speculates whether Dawkins' "theory is now in the process of further evolution -- and whether it might even jump the species barrier into what is vulgarly known by lesser mortals as faith."

It wouldn't be the first time a prominent atheist scientist turns to faith. Phillips writes: "Anthony Flew, the celebrated philosopher and former high priest of atheism, spectacularly changed his mind and concluded -- as set out in his book There Is A God -- that life had indeed been created by a governing and purposeful intelligence, a change of mind that occurred because he followed where the scientific evidence led him."

This was the second intellectual dual between the two men. The first debate, in which they debated Dawkins' most recent book, The God Delusion, can be seen here. The quality of the sound and the video is super.