Feeling low? Find your inner ‘sisu’
DO YOU remember reading about ‘hygge’? The Danish word (pronounced ‘hoo-gar’) means ‘cosiness’ or ‘wellbeing.’ If you visualise snuggling under a soft blanket, with candles lit all around, and perhaps somebody lovely to talk to, then you’re enacting ‘hygge’.
Add three little dogs on an old sale-price sofa, and a stove crackling with logs my husband chopped — and welcome to our sitting room!
But I’ve just learned another Scandinavian word, this one from Finland — and I like it even more. ‘Sisu’ (pronounced ‘sissuh’) means ‘resilience’ — and it’s something I find myself talking and writing about a lot.
Why? Because it worries me that so many things I’d categorise as testing, upsetting or saddening are often described in terms of ‘trauma’ (or ‘triggering’ or ‘micro-aggressions’) and held to require serious therapy or medication.
All mini-dramas are turned into crises. In contrast, my mother always says, ‘You just have to get on with it’, and that’s how I feel, too.
Sisu involves stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness. So far so inspiring.
The Finns, who spend half the year with little or no daylight, say it expresses their national character and claim we don’t have an equivalent in English. But I’ll take resilience and grit.
I see this as all about staying determined to cope. Whatever life chucks at you. Statistically, this is the time of year when people feel at their lowest ebb and it’s ages until the renewal of Easter. But why not keep some fairy lights up all year round — as we do?
If it’s cold and dank outside, wrap up warmly and go for a brisk walk. Cook stew. If something goes wrong in your life, keep panic and defeatism under control and ask yourself, ‘What can I do about this?’
Breathe deeply, make a list and tell yourself you’re in control. Are you telling me it’s hard? That, as the Finns might say, is precisely the point.
Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, london W8 5TT, or email bel.mooney@dailymail.co.uk. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.