Adversity

Being from the poorest country in Europe, my family has had to endure many hardships throughout my childhood, especially bringing to mind the long hard winters; having to walk an hour to school in 1+ meter of snow. The autumn and spring were even worse in this respect because the pothole-riddled streets would flood.

Getting wet up to my knees wasn’t the problem, it was the risk of stepping through an open manhole with no cover (almost all of them were missing, and in early autumn the street cleaners would rake the fallen leaves and assemble their leaf piles haphazardly and often over open manholes (which were obviously not visible under the leaves) - it only took falling through one time to never jump in one again :)).

For all these experiences I am grateful as it instilled in me from a young age the value of resilience, adaptability, and crafty ingenuity. I’d watch my father (on the rare occasion he was home and not away working in another country to provide for our family) fix all manner of things by himself with limited tools (many requiring fixing themselves and many more having been devised from other obscure items) and I aspired to be as handy - so much so that, to his bittersweet joy, I began taking up “fixing” everything I keenly observed could do with a little optimisation myself.

The subjects of my meticulous optimisations often were so optimised after I was done, that they took on a sort of more open-minded, avant-garde function, like gracefully decorating the inside of the bin, for example.

It was also during this time that I developed a penchant for philanthropy, designating much of my time to the selfless act of emancipating cruelly oppressed magnetic strips from their cassette-tape sepulchre - my parents weren’t quite so passionate about my cause.

Indeed even after moving to the UK in 2015, my family endured adversity due to socio-economic disparity and pervasive xenophobia (which is now thankfully getting better), but again it served as a reminder about the power of will and determination.

Despite the hardships and innumerable sacrifices my father in particular had to make in order to bring us to London in hope of better education and opportunities, we now live what may be considered a relatively middle-class suburban life-style. I had the opportunity to study at a London University, which many people from my native country can’t even dream of. I soon expect to graduate with distinction in BsC Computing, and the stark contrast between the earlier half of my life and now paints a hopeful future which one can only hope will be characterised by the same rate of growth.

For all of the hardships and less-than-ideal conditions I am grateful, for as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. I am also extremely grateful to behold the gift of sight, as I was born with cataracts, and had I not received the 4 critical surgeries from ages 5-7, I would now be blind.

In a way only typical of the human condition, the contrast of previously-experienced adversity breeds a more positive, resilient, and content demeanour - I think that’s why the Finns are the happiest people in the world, despite cruel winters and all the implications they bring. We need challenges. It is a curious feature of our condition that we simply cannot appreciate something fully without perspective: gold is shiny compared to dirt, a tractor is fast compared to ploughing by hand, and indeed making full use of one’s capabilities to adapt, overcome, and evolve are fulfilling compared to withering away.