New Zealand Odyssey: Epilogue from Finland

Antti, me, and Heikki's son Ilmari on Saima Lake.

I write this from a flat in Helsinki's center. I'm more than half-way through a three week stay, here to do some work with my collaborator Heikki Haario and his student, former University of Montana Fulbright exchange student, and soon to be PhD, Antti Solonen.

Back in Dunedin, Jen and the kids are about ready to board the plane home. With me gone, the burden of cleaning the Baldwin Street house and most of the packing was left to Jen. Not ideal, but this research trip will pay a month of my salary, which we need to make it through the summer. So basically, it's teamwork.

While here, I've missed the family terribly and wished I could fly back to Dunedin to be with them. More to the point, I've wished that we could live the year all over again. That's how good the living is/was down there. Since I've been gone, I've been calling it 'the Baldwin Street bubble'. It took leaving to really see it clearly.

Before we went to New Zealand, people said that it's like the US fifty years ago. Certainly, it feels like a simpler, less pressure filled, way of life. It feels like if Montana became its own country. A big difference was the schools.

For Alex, it went from stress and pressure at C.S. Porter (unnecessary for a 7th grader) to an enjoyable experience and no complaints in Dunedin. And Ellie wanted to stay in school until the day before she left Dunedin; for her, school was what she like best about her time in New Zealand.

In the States, we want our students to be competitive with students from other countries, so we increase the pressure on teachers, so that they'll push our kids harder, and the resulting atmosphere is definitely less enjoyable for the kids. I'm not convinced that we come out ahead with this approach.

As for myself, one of the things I'd really hoped for in Dunedin was that I'd come down: from a place of higher stress, intensity, and honestly, negativity. I felt like I had lost something important, that the person I want to be was just out of reach. It took months, but things finally shifted, and with that shift, my relationships -- with Jen, the kids, and myself -- changed in a positive way. My hope, prayer, and goal is that the change will be permanent.

Back in Finland: the alchemy of research is a mystery. You get a few guys (in this case) together with similar mathematical interests, some shared ambition, an addiction to new ideas and discovery, and see what happens. It's fun, but sometimes seems so unimportant, in the grand scheme of things, like racing bikes or something. The difference is it pays the bills and is the reason we've been able to have all of these experience. I was lucky to fall into this math research thing.

Safe travels family.