We have our renovation guys here on and off at the moment. They are a father and son team who both have their separate companies, but work together often. The father who is now semi-retired and looks like the old man from Up, except with a large smile, did some work for us back in 2015 on our apartment. They are genuinely nice people and both hardworking, which made it a no-brainer to hire them, although they are sporadic as they are doing our place between other jobs.
It was only the father here today and probably tomorrow and he lives about an hour drive away, which means he is sleeping at our place over night, on a mattress on the floor, as we don't have any other beds currently and our sofa is not going to cut it. We make lunch and dinner and coffee throughout the day and we chat with them when we can, though we are both working too so it is hard.
But, today while drinking afternoon coffee together, he told us that his niece died two weeks ago and his son was very close to her, as they had grown up together. She was murdered by her husband at close range with a shotgun, before he turned it on himself, presumably because she was going to finally leave him after years of putting up with his drinking.
This is unfortunately too common in Finland.
My wife's friend as a teen, was killed by her own father, along with her other sibling, before he turned the gun on himself. The father did this as revenge on his wife, leaving his wife alive to live with the pain of losing her children.
As said, this is all too common and I have noted this many times during my life in Finland, that Finns repress their emotions until they snap. Violence in Finland is very low with murder being rare (85 murders in 2018), but there is a lot of domestic violence, which is usually fueled by alcohol. I assume that while they "successfully" suppress their emotions most of the time, the alcohol reduces their control and snap.
I learned today that from all the murders in Finland, about 70% of them involve alcohol and not only that, 60% of the male and 30% of the female perpetrators had been arrested at least once for drink driving. That is a pretty interesting statistic I think - considering that I have lived here for 17 years, drive often and at different times of the day - and can count the times I have been breathalyzed on one hand. There have been weekends in Australia where I have been tested as many times as the last 17 years here.
It is hard for me to understand what kind of person does these kinds of things to anyone, let alone someone they supposedly love, or loved once. Some people will talk about mental illness, but perhaps it is not illness at all, but rather a lack of care taken with the mind to the point that it has degraded and weakened, making it susceptible to breakage and dysfunction. Maybe mental health is more often an emotional maintenance process, and lack of health isn't illness, but rather, neglect.
I have often run mental simulations where I have tried to imagine what I could say to someone on e the spot that would stop them from committing some act of violence, but have realized that most of the time, there is very little that could be said to change circumstances, as the person has taken time to get to the point of breaking, and it will likely take time to repair whatever damage has been done. Mental health may be a continual process of maintenance, but we aren't well equipped or trained to learn about and improve our processes and we think that we are fine, that we have control - until we don't.
While temporary insanity might be used as a legal defense, is this actually the case when there has been potentially years of personal neglect that has led to that moment of insanity? That loss of control threshold of one person, is nowhere near losing control for another who has been trained to be mentally in control. Why is it that we see the importance of things like learning math, the getting a job to earn money and forming and building relationships, yet most discount the role our own mind and mental state play in these areas, considering that most of us think little and do nothing about improving our ability to affect our state of mind.
If a person has been physically trained in martial arts and commits a violent crime, their body is considered a weapon as the person has skilled control and techniques over it, but what is actually the problem is that their mind has not been trained, so their body can't be in control. It is the "guns don't kill people, people kill people with guns" argument, something I tend to agree with, as people who are mentally skilled to control their emotions, are able to make their decisions to act - meaning that if they kill, they are doing it intentionally - there is no insanity defense.
But, gun or no gun, anything can be used as a weapon and an untrained mind in an uncontrolled emotional state will use it to inflict damage, intentionally - from that state of mind. Once the state of mind subsides, they might be regretful, but the intention to harm was there in the out of control state, a state that could have been affected if attention had been paid to learn how to affect it. Yet, we live in a world that encourages unbridled emotional energy to be released, no matter the damage it could cause, no matter that the lack of emotional control becomes a positively reinforced habit that makes improving control increasingly hard, as it encourages degradation of control.
As said, I don't know what actually goes on in each case of someone snapping, but I do believe that the instances or conditions required to catalyze the snap could be affected if people spent more time developing strategies to cope, practiced more compassion rather than focusing on their own feelings and expressions of their feelings, and generally improved their mental health. A process of self-reflection would likely be a good starting point - perhaps to see how much of the suffering that leads to the snap, is actually self-inflicted or within the potential of control.
We like to blame others, but we should have the control to choose when and how we express our emotions and if we can't, we are not in control - meaning, we are controlled. When we lose control, it may indicate how little we have done in the past to maintain it. These days we have far more access to resources to help us, yet we are apparently neglecting it more and becoming emotionally weaker, despite general conditions being far better than what they were in the past.
We seem to put an ever higher premium on our own emotions and our rights to show them, while taking less responsibility over them to the point where we claim, we have no control at all. If you can't control yourself, what do you actually own?
An actual laundry
This is our laundry in the basement - which we do not have the funds to fix properly, so we have decided to give it a lick of paint for now. It was the old heating room where there was an oil-burning furnace, and the walls and ceilings were grimy and grey, the windows black where the oil was escaping. The concrete floor is the main problem, but that is a huge amount of work that we can't afford to do now.
My wife was helping a couple of nights ago when these shots were taken, but I have been there the last couple alone, trying to get it finished. It is really slow going, especially taking the windows out and cleaning the down for painting. They haven't been removed for 20-odd years and they looked it.
There is still a fair bit to do, including building a wall to section off the air/water exchange system from the rest of the room, as that will make it seem far nicer than it currently is. I really want to flatten the floor surface, but that'll take some more time and a little bit of planning.
As said, still not finished, but the room is feeling much cleaner, especially without the decades old spider webs covering the windows and the grime visible in the million nooks and crannies. The surface now feels like stucco and once we do eventually paint the floor, it should be nice and clean, at least clean enough to keep our dirty laundry out of sight.
Looking at that picture, it looks like I have a minion helping me, but it has just been me and my aching body from doing the ceiling with a thick roller and all of the little bits I needed to do with a brush. Tomorrow night, it will be back upstairs to sand walls and paint there and on the weekend, more of the same. At least my minion wife will be around to help with that too.
I find it quite relaxing (although painful) to do this kind of work as it is mindless and I can think of other things. Tonight I was listening to some interesting podcasts that I wanted to catch up on, but haven't had the chance. One issue is of course that doing this work on the house means that I don't have as much time to write, so I end up writing late at night like I am now - as I still need to process my thoughts before bed, with writing being the most effective way to do so.
Writing is good for mental hygiene - perhaps more people should try it - they might discover some methods to control themselves better.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]