Just a fancy title for a post of this and thats. Impressions is the title of my art diary, a notebook I use for just random drawings and paintings, the impressions that I’d rather illustrate than describe in writing (though, most commonly I do both). Impressions is also the hashtag I decided to use for the drawings or paintings I publish on my Artzy Bunny Facebook page, when they are originally from my Impressions art diary.

The first thing Facebook showed me this morning was a picture of me and my Honda Civic 7 years ago. At the time of purchase it was three years old, had 18000km on the odo and was the first car I’d ever owned myself. Still, four years ago I traded it for a new Honda Insight, automatic transmission (which was the only real enhancement, if you don’t count the stereo supporting USB stick). I still miss my Civic. It was a damned nice car, the sports model having enough power, the smallish car being agile enough, the ride smooth and easy, a car matching my temperament perfectly. Some day, I will be driving a Civic again. Don’t get me wrong, our Mercedes is nice. It’s just so huge!

I woke up this morning with a bit of a headache. We had a nice sauna last night and even though I did drink almost a liter of sparkly water (with a bit of grapefruit juice in it) while in sauna, I guess I didn’t rehydrate myself properly afterwards or something. I have been without alcohol (and sugar and white/fast carbs) for a month now and generally haven’t had any headaches during that time. I’ve been feeling fabulous, even my spirits have lifted, and I’ve slowly but surely started to lose these extra kilos I had gained during the past year or two. Life has been a bit hard since my mom died two years ago, and even more so after my grandma died last August.

It’s almost mid June and the weather has gone from summery May to a cold and rainy June. Kind of normal, though. I just hope we’ll get a proper July this year, not a stromy cold one like last year. We’re in the June birthday zone now. A few days ago my mom would’ve turned 63. Today, my beloved hometown Helsinki is celebrating it’s 466th birthday with the traditional Helsinki Day. Tomorrow is my turn, and after that a bunch of my ex-relatives ave their birthdays. At the end of June my older niece is turning four.

Yesterday I was having an artsy day. After doing the one garden job I had planned for the day – planting the black currant bush my dad gave my younger daughter for ending elementary school – I took out my water colors and paint brushes and painted a picture of that little bush in my Impressions notebook, then moved on to paint a starfish card, then went out to the yard with our acrylic colors and brushes and I painted a pheasant. Later in the evening, while warming up our sauna, I decided to try out the oil pastels and drew a colorful fish card. I felt relaxed and somehow satisfied.

Painting and drawing does that to me. I don’t have the patience to color these mindfullness coloring books, someone else’s drawings with little details. They couldn’t interest me less. I need to create myself, even if I’m no Monet. I need to experiment and try out things and learn on my own. Even the idea of taking some drawing lessons agitates me. To me, the whole process of letting it flow from within, even if the result is not technically as good as it could be with some studying, is the most important thing. Just like in writing, too. Since school, I haven’t studied writing and I don’t want to.

Another thing about this cool time of early summer is the ticks. About a month ago we applied this tick repellent liniment on the dogs. Most apparently it has now worn off. They do say it only lasts for four weeks. Last night I tried to slap and kill the little insect that was tickling my arm – I mean, between tiny flying things and aphids, it’s not that uncommon to have something crawling on your arm around here (we may live in Helsinki, but we live in a suburb with nice yards and patches of forest – almost like countryside). Usually these little crawlers are easily killed but not this one. Nope. And I understood the reason, when I picked it up and looked at it. A damned tick! And then I picked another one from the back of the other dog. Nearly freaked out enough not to sleep.

I did though, sleep that is. For almost 12 hours I slept quite solidly. Would’ve slept even longer if it wasn’t for my husband who decided there around eleven that it was time to wake up and smell the coffee (obviously, waiting for me to get up and fix the cappucinos, since somehow mysteriously it has become my job).

To dream is good, they say. I have a dream. A dream of having a house on Tinos, facing the Aegean Sea. A house with a nice veranda and a garden. I would sit on the veranda, sipping a freddo cappucino or a gin&tonic, sometimes reading, sometimes writing. Sometimes I’d tend to the garden with my husband. The deep blue Aegean glistening in the sun, my skin parched by the sun, the salt and the wind. Like one of the tomatoes being sun dried in our garden.

To dream is good, they say. They’re supposed to keep you alive, push you forward into achieving them. Yet, whenever I let myself acknowledge my persisting dream, it seems to crush me underneath of it. It overwhelms me. Is it too big? Is there such a thing as a dream too big? It’s too unprobable. Some day, we’ll get out of the city, buy a house in the middle of nowhere. Maybe some day we’ll buy a house somewhere in the coasts of Finland. That’s a more realistic dream and goal. That’s a dream that doesn’t weigh heavily on me.

Finnish countryside is beautiful in its own simplistic (to my eyes) way. Finnish coastal areas and archipelago even more so with the bare rugged bedrock and crooked pine trees. The sea, the Baltic sea, is barely a sea – it’s shallow and gray and low on salt – but still it IS a sea. It’s the sea I grew up by, the sea that saw my tears and heard my cries when I used to haunt the shores as a troubled teen, the semi-salty wind blowing in my face, tousling my hair. I used to love that sea and that wind. It was before I met the Aegean and the meltemi.

My backup dream is to get a nice house with a nice big yard next to the sea somewhere there on the southwest coast of Finland. A place with its own shoreline, a place where I could feel the salty wind and watch the unruly sea from our own veranda. Not a bad way to live, that either. If it wasn’t for the cold. These Finnish winters with barely a hope of any kind of summer are killing me slowly but surely. Four out of five Finnish summers are so cold that I feel betrayed when autumn comes.

I told my husband this morning, when I was feeling the longing to the sun so keenly that it brought tears to my eyes, that the best thing would be to have both, one day. The remote house somewhere there by the Gulf of Finland and a summer house there on Tinos. Tinos is not exactly a warm and fuzzy place in the winter time either, what with the fierce storms and all. But then again, if we would be able to spend half of the year – the better half at that – on Tinos, what does it really matter where we suffer the long cold months of winter? It’s the same snow and ice and cold everywhere around here. No real pleasure in a frozen sea, now is there?

While there are quite pretty (old, I like the old architechture, the 1800’s style best) houses in Finland too, I absolutely love the Mediterranean architechture, and the Cycladean architechture especially. I love the old villages and towns, with narrow passages between white washed houses with cobalt blue window panes and the occasional blue roof. With bougeainvilleas and oleanders blooming. Still, it is the solitary solace of a lone house on a cliff I am looking for. A house overlooking the sea, within walking distance of a beach. Nothing extravagant. Just a simple house with a simple patio.

Maybe one day my dream – a dream I know my husband shares – will come true. Just maybe. I keep on dreaming, though mostly I need to push the dream aside, away from my conciousness, bury it in some dark nook just to survive. Otherwise it overwhlems me to tears, crushes me down in despair, wanting. Wanting so bad that it hurts, but not being able to do anything about it. Not now, anyway. Maybe some day. Maybe.

God, how I miss that place where the wind blows, setting my soul free!

Every now and then you hear someone ask: what was the happiest day of your life? People look back and think about days like “when I got married” or “when my child was born” or “when I graduated” etc. And there’s nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, looking back at the joys you’ve had in your life is usually a good thing. Remembering the good and happy times can be an important resource when life is giving you lemons. It can be the strong undercurrent that helps you make the lemonade.

I can list many of those “happiest days of my life” too. Such as the day I got married – even if the marriage evetually ended in divorce. The days when my daughters were born. The day my current husband told me he loved me. Yet, those are just the highlights. Who remembers the normal nothing-special days as happy?

In recent years, I have been through divorce, brain surgery, my mom’s death, my grandmother’s death and things that I do not want to list here. All of this finally got to me last winter – too much is just too much – when my axiety became so bad I didn’t sleep and I was just screaming at my husband without real reason. I got help, but when the axieties subsided, on came the depression, that probably had been creeping on for some time. I didn’t want to work, not even get out of bed. I didn’t feel joy, life felt like tar I needed to drag myself through. I wasn’t suicidal, but often times thought that everybody would be better off if I didn’t exist.

You know the movie It’s a Wonderful World? We used to watch it every single Christmas with my dad when I was growing up. One Christmas my sister and I hid the movie (a VHS tape) so that we couldn’t watch it. We sat on the sofa with meek faces, watching our dad look for the VHS for a long long time. I even started to feel pity towards him, but my sister pinched me to stay strong. Eventually dad figured out our ploy and I think he was quite hurt. We didn’t watch it ever again with him.

Sometimes in the depths of my depression, I thought about that movie. Just a fleeting thought, but enough to bring me back to reality. Not that I thought that my little actions in this life would have changed the fates of too many people, but there is my family. My husband and our three daughters. Our dogs. All of whom rely on me in some way. So I never neglected my motherly duties, I never shied away from those who love me, whom I love. I tried to be there for them, forgetting my own misery.

Today I woke up – when I finally woke up, waking up is never easy for me – feeling the luckiest person alive. Thinking to myself that this is the best time of my life, the happiest day of my life. There’s nothing special about this day. I snuggled next to my husband for a while before getting up, like I do most mornings. I had my cappucino. I took the dogs out. I started to work. I shed some tears over a video George Takei had shared in Facbook. I missed my mom and my grandma.

I still think this is the happiest day of my life. Ever since yesterday. Yesterday was the happiest day of my life since the day before that. I believe I’m pretty much over my depression. I have always believed in living in the moment. Learn from the past, remember the good times, dream about the future. But don’t dwell on either one. See the good in each day.

Happiness is not a destination, it’s a way of life. It’s little things like sunshine and a smile. It’s the big things, the family, friends, dogs, that are. It’s about focusing on the good instead of the bad. It’s about seeing that what is good in things instead of the bad. It’s about saying “I’m so glad we got our other car fixed and running in time to turn that leasing car in” instead of “oh, this is a miserable day, I need to turn my nice leasing car in”. A deeply depressed person is not able to do that, but as for the non-depressed, it’s about the attitude.

Yes, sometimes life feels too hard. But in the end, it’s just life. I prefer to look on the bright side of things. We have a saying – in Finnish like it is in English too – “Nothing so bad, as not to be good for something”. I try to find the good. And when there is none, for I cannot find anything good in e.g. my mom’s or grandma’s deaths, I try to accept them as what they are: a part of the circle of life. That understanding does not mean that I wouldn’t grieve, I do, fiercely! It gives me the ability to let go. The grief can’t suck me down.

[Edit 28.8.2015 – A day after writing this I stumbled upon this article about happiness. I can pretty much vouch for every point made in it. Happiness is mostly a choice 🙂 ]