Paradise is out there - but not where you'd expect it. To find paradise you have to take the time to look. Few people do. They open travel magazines and pick up a prefab tour. Oh what fun. Five minutes for pictures. Two months later you look at things in those pictures you never saw before. You can say 'I was there - that's me, that little speck, at the foot of Big Ben'.
Hanna Brodda published an interesting article today. Not that she's necessarily enlightened but she's pointing in the right direction.
http://www.e24.se/kvinna/kronikor/artikel_505983.e24
Some parts roughly translated.
How can a career person choose to live outside the city? In most cases I suspect a STRONG factor.
A stereotype dream.
With a house, a garden, and a patio it's always great weather. You see how you come home from work and choose to sit outside in the evenings. On Saturdays you let the children and the dog loose in the garden and they play side by side all the while you go on sleeping - and later when you want to get up you partake of a wonderful breakfast on your patio. You like to tinker with things so when you have time on your hands you build a nice play cottage for your overly happy children.
Crash! But wait a minute! It's first now in the middle of June it gets warm enough to sit outdoors and eat. And now it's only two hectic weeks remaining until your holidays. And during the holiday season your residential area on Lidingö, in Danderyd, or in Bromma literally dies - and you don't want to be abandoned, your children don't want to be abandoned either, so you have to go away on your holiday too.
Maybe you won't have a barbecue after all. Not on any of the eleven evenings all summer when the weather permits. How are you going to have the time to make the food, carry it out, when you have to work, pick up the kids, and make it home before both you and your children are starving - the trip suddenly takes longer than ever before. Anything from fifteen minutes to an hour - yes it does: don't listen to them when they say 'when I'm sitting on the commuter train it's only 7 minutes to the central station'. You don't work at or live at the central station! You have to keep on traveling, changing trains, waiting - and whoosh but suddenly you've 'traveled' away the time you needed to make your barbecue.
I live in the city and I am scared to death of the suburbs. I gave it a real try in Mälarhöjden for a few months but I ended up running away. It was empty - at the playground, on the street outside and in my garden. Not because there was a war on but only because there are so few people who can find room to live in a villa area.
The children played in my beautiful garden for four minutes. Then they wanted to visit a friend or they wanted me to come out and play. And I didn't have time for that because I had to re-kalk the bathroom.
We didn't have time with a play cottage because the ground was weak, the facade had to be polished, and the apples that fell down in droves had to be shoveled up.
It was a level of stress I wish on no one.
It's not the city; it's not the country; it's the work life. The rat race. The ekorrhjul. That's what you have to get out of. Then if you want to live in a city or the countryside is your business. You choose.
You pick your paradise.
