5th year ticket

In the excitement of everything I have forgotten that it is now 5 years since we moved to Sweden. 5 years, who would have imagined that ? It kind of feels like I have always lived in Sweden now. I remember stuff from New Zealand, but it's more like snapshots or postcards. I don't think back with too many emotions. If I do then it's more about things that annoyed me, or rather annoy me today about things back then. If that makes sense. I think that I accepted things simply because I didn't know there was an alternative. Having lived in 2 difference cultures I have developed the skills necessary to be more objective. That's both positive and negative.

 

Aside from dragging about 300kg of kitchen cabinets back to IKEA, and getting the worst headcold I have had in years, the past year has been pretty uneventful with regard to my Swedish experiences. I did visit a counsellor for the first time in Sweden this year, as part of my workplace health assessment. I've been to counsellors before in New Zealand and I have to say that this latest one wasn't terribly good. Oh, I got given tips and advice, but it was all very generic and nothing that I hadn't already thought of by myself. It was at the time when I was feeling very stressed as a result of work. I figured also that it was amplified by me still adjusting to my new home and particuarly struggling with my level of Swedish language skills. Not just the work content, which was nothing too difficult, but a combination of all of the above. His sole piece of advice was for me to speak English. That way I would have one less thing to stress over. On the surface that made perfect dense, but it wasn't the right approach for me. I tried to explain to him that me speaking English would result in me feeling more stressed about not being able to contribute in the same fashion as my colleagues. He didn't seem to be able to grasp that my thinking wasn't the same as his thinking, and didn't seem to want to consider an alternative course of action. So while he was pleasant enough, and it did help a little, I didn't come away with the same level of support and direction I was used to from counsellors back in New Zealand.

 

We were sitting having fika with some friends last week and one of them asked me what I found to be most irritating about Swedes. I sat there thinking, and it was difficult to come up with something that annoyed me. It dawned on me that I had become so used to the Swedish way of living that everything now felt like it was normal and natural. Which of course it is to a Swede. Had I now become more Swedish than a New Zealander ? I had to ask my wife what it was that I had found to be most annoying. She knew. My number one gripe was that Swedes are incredibly slow at doing things. Incredibly slow. The majority of times it's not because they don't know what to do. They aren't stupid. It's the transition from the thinking part to the doing part which can take forever. That's frustrating when you've come from an English speaking country and physical actions are at a much higher pace.

 

So why don't I see that any more ? I know there are times when I need to do something quickly and the Swedish system just won't work for me. But now that I know exactly how they work, I can plan around them so that it doesn't slow me down from my pace. If you know about obstacles in advance, you can easily plan your attack around them. Without the feelings of annoyance. For the most part. But I guess for the rest of the time I have adjusted my pace to match those around me. As we discussed this I realised that my newly acquired "slowness" didn't bother me today. I could still do the things I wanted in the time I had allocated. That probably means that I'm now doing less than I would have attempted 5 years ago, or have extended out the time from that  was used to. Either way, I seem to have been assimilated into the Swedish style of doing things. And it doesn't hurt. Which leaves me wondering if I really needed to move so quickly in the first place ?