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Sisu
Linda Robinson
Sisu is a Finnish word that twelve Finns will define in a dozen diverging Finnish ways. It’s a banana split of words. Start with a scoop each of spirit, fortitude and determination. Ladle liberally with hardiness, daring, guts and resolve. Swirl mettle and moxie over all and top with a cherry of audacity. Sprinkle with oomph.
It’s a word appropriate to northern people who live with weather cold enough to shatter stone. Sisu is not “I walked five miles today.” Sisu is “I walked five miles today, uphill in a blinding snowstorm alone. Barefoot.”
Finnish websites counsel to be careful using “courage” to describe sisu, but do not say why one should hesitate. Courage means to me - not unrelenting bravery - but moving forward in the face of insurmountable odds with gusto. Maybe your heart quavers, and your knees quiver, but forward you go regardless.
I think of sisu as spirit. If the spirit dish you serve sisu in is washed with humor, vigor, vitality, and warmth, then what you have is life force with vigor. And there isn’t a better definition of spirit that I have found yet.
Perhaps courage is sisu and spirit melded into one formidable force.
My friend Margo had sisu. Waiting for her turn in the chemotherapy room one bitterly cold and snowing winter day, she spoke with a young woman next to her. Margo learned, in the conversation, that the young woman was traveling from Flint to Ann Arbor every day to bring her father for his treatments. Margo returned to our office late that day and gathered us around. The mission she assigned was to call in any chips we had for hotel accommodations for the woman and her father for as long as they might need it, for free.
When Margo next saw the young woman in the hospital, she handed her a pink message slip. “Please call this person. We have found a room for you and your father during this difficult time.”
Margo had more than one gift, but the gift I appreciated most was her gift to cause the folks around her to want to do their absolute best. I don’t know how she accomplished this, or what wiles she wielded. I never identified a look, a phrase, or a method that sparked recognition. “Ah ha! That’s how she does it!” She empowered a battalion that carries her spirit forward still.
Perhaps that was how she fought the Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma that had her life in its teeth: while appearing to her friends and colleagues to be unaware of the ongoing battle, Margo was energetically engaged in combat to outmaneuver the disease by cloning altruistic troopers. Perhaps good deeds, perpetrated anonymously, with barely discernable movements, were her catapults, launching positive force fields over the battlements of cancer’s fortress.
There are dozens of stories about Margo: storytellers include her colleagues, beneficiaries of her spirited good will, her friends and family. All are tales of sisu.
Margo passed on quietly at night in August of 2003. I woke, having heard my front door open, and got up to see who it was. I was surprised that I wasn’t scared when I realized the front door was still closed and locked. I knew Margo had come to say good-bye.
Two weeks before, I had been out of state in the wilderness. The day after she died, an undelivered message appeared on my cell phone. It was Margo. She told me that she had called hospice, was no longer seeing visitors, but she had told her husband that if I called, she wanted to speak with me. If we didn’t have a chance to talk, what she wanted me to know was that she wasn’t afraid. “Do you understand?” she asked. “I am not afraid.”
That is sisu.
As 2008 begins and I open the book of the new year to write what I need to carry over into the next twelve months of my life, I will write “sisu” and remember Margo’s words: “I am not afraid.” I hope you will, too.
Linda Robinson is an artist who is still growing up in a small town in beautiful Michigan. Her work may be viewed at "Sweetgrass: A Store to Awaken Your Spirit" in Davisburg, MI, at Thomas Video in Clawson, and on her website at www.58moon.com
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