Involution Labs

Tag: love

  • The Children We Were, The People They Are

    A few years have passed since I wrote my first 500 words of wisdom, and one thing has not changed: I still stand with children.

    Perhaps that is because I remember being one.

    Adults often tell children to enjoy their freedom before work begins, but childhood is not always free. Children spend most of their days in school, followed by homework, expectations and activities arranged by adults. Their time is managed, their behaviour assessed and their distress frequently dismissed as a phase.

    Growing up can be magical. It can also be exhausting.

    My children helped me recognise parts of my own childhood that I had learned to overlook. Their teenage struggles were not inconveniences to manage. They were experiences to understand. Parenting, for me, became less about shaping children into successful adults and more about protecting the space in which they could discover who they already were becoming.

    A parent leaves a mark, whether they intend to or not.

    My children are not my legacy, because they do not belong to my story. They have stories of their own. But being their mother has changed me more profoundly than anything else I have done. They have brought me more joy than any story I have written—and I have written quite a few.

    I still consider myself a beginner. Not because I have achieved nothing, but because I am still curious. Expertise can become another identity to defend. Curiosity leaves the door open.

    As I entered what I once called my second rebellion, I began coming out in more ways than one. Menopause was not an ending. It was a refusal: of shame, silence and the idea that a woman becomes less valuable as she ages.

    Grey hair, wrinkles and a changing body are not evidence that life has gone wrong. They are evidence that life has happened.

    My identity has changed too. I once wondered whether I had lost my Swedishness. I had not. It had travelled with me, becoming entangled with my Karelian roots and my Irish life. We do not have to choose one place from which to belong. Sometimes belonging is what grows between places.

    I have also spent much of my life thinking about death. My children used to think it strange that I practised dying each night and returning each morning. But death gave shape to life. Having survived times when I did not want to be here, I no longer see my continued existence as something ordinary.

    It is not always easy to make peace with living.

    I once wanted to disappear completely. Perhaps I wanted freedom from being remembered. I understand that differently now. We do not control what remains of us. We live in other people’s memories, in stories, in digital traces and in consequences we may never see.

    What we can do is live honestly while we are here.

    Tell your children your stories, including the ones that make you uncomfortable. Let them see that adults make mistakes, change their minds and continue becoming. Listen when their version of events differs from yours.

    Allow them to be gloriously themselves, especially when they challenge who you thought they would be.

    Perhaps that is what authentic parenting asks of us: not to create children in our own image, but to meet them as they emerge.

  • Change Is Freedom, and Freedom Is Change

    If you are here, you have a right to be here.

    You do not have to earn your existence through achievement, obedience or usefulness. Worth is not a prize awarded to those who perform life correctly. It begins with being alive.

    Children arrive as people, not unfinished adults. They deserve love, safety and guidance, but also respect. Their wisdom is often ignored because it does not arrive in the language of authority. We ask children to listen, but how often do we listen to them?

    Parenting can change the world because it is one of the first places where power is learned. A child discovers whether love is conditional, whether their body belongs to them, whether questions are welcome and whether disagreement is dangerous. Families can take many forms. What matters is not how closely they resemble tradition, but whether the people within them are free to grow.

    Love is not control.

    Education should expand a child’s relationship with the world, not reduce it to obedience. Yet many schools reward compliance more easily than curiosity. They teach children to compete before they understand what they are competing for. By the time formal education ends, many people have learned how to meet expectations but forgotten how to recognise their own interests.

    This does not mean learning has failed. Learning continues wherever curiosity survives.

    Question what you inherit. Not because everything old is wrong, but because nothing becomes true simply by being repeated. Systems are created by people, and people can change them. What feels permanent may only be familiar.

    Choice is a human right, but no choice exists entirely outside circumstance. Freedom is not simply doing whatever we want. It is understanding what shapes us well enough to decide what we wish to carry forward.

    Being yourself is not a final achievement. The self is not something hidden inside us, waiting to be uncovered once and for all. We are always becoming—through experience, relationships, mistakes, loss and change. Differentness does not need to be corrected. Belonging should not require disappearance.

    Make friends across the imaginary borders we are taught to defend, but also learn to be present with yourself. Self-knowledge is not self-indulgence. It helps us recognise when we are living from desire and when we are living from fear.

    Do not turn pain into a moral failure. People reach for substances, distractions and escape for many reasons. Judgment rarely heals what understanding has not yet reached. Sometimes we save ourselves. Sometimes another person helps us remember that we are worth saving. Most often, healing is something we do together.

    Talk about death, because death gives shape to life. We do not need to pretend certainty about what comes next. It is enough to recognise that endings are part of being alive—and that awareness can make the present more vivid.

    Look after your body, your mind, your sexuality and your capacity for joy. Pleasure is not the enemy of wisdom. Laughter is not a distraction from seriousness. Gratitude, empathy and forgiveness are forms of wealth, but even these should not become obligations used to silence anger or avoid truth.

    Find the language that connects you to something larger, whether you call it God, nature, humanity, mystery or cosmic love.

    Change is not the loss of freedom.

    Change is how freedom remains alive.

  • When Help Doesn’t Feel Like Help

    What happens when someone asks for help and leaves feeling worse?

    It’s not always obvious. No raised voices. No clear mistake. And yet something shifts. The person who came to be heard walks away feeling misunderstood, reduced, or dismissed. This happens more often than we like to admit. Systems of care are built with good intentions. Mental health professionals are trained to support, diagnose, and guide. People enter these spaces expecting help.

    But sometimes the experience doesn’t match the intention.

    There is often a quiet pressure in these systems to know.

    To identify the issue.
    To name it.
    To move towards a solution.

    Uncertainty is uncomfortable. It slows things down. So instead of sitting with not knowing, we move quickly toward interpretation.

    The person becomes something to be understood from the outside.

    Authority plays a role too.

    The professional holds knowledge and structure. The person seeking help, especially a young person, comes in vulnerable, often unsure of how to express what they’re feeling.

    This imbalance shapes everything.

    What gets said.
    What gets heard.
    What gets taken seriously.

    Sometimes the problem isn’t what is said, but how quickly we move past it.

    Advice comes before understanding. Reassurance replaces curiosity. Language is used to contain something that hasn’t yet been fully expressed.

    Nothing intentionally harmful. And yet the result can be the same: The person doesn’t feel heard.

    Many people have had the experience of leaving a session feeling worse than when they went in.

    Not because no one cared. But because something didn’t land. Because the response didn’t match the experience.

    This is about recognising a pattern, not blaming professionals.

    Systems that prioritise efficiency, outcomes, and clarity can unintentionally make deep listening harder. Even the most well-meaning professional is working within constraints. And those constraints shape how care is delivered. For young people, this matters even more.

    If the first attempt to speak is met with misunderstanding or judgement, the next attempt becomes harder. Trust weakens. Silence feels safer.  Not because there is nothing to say.
    But because it feels like it won’t be heard.

    So, the question is simple, but not easy:

    What would it mean to truly listen? Not to fix. Not to interpret too quickly. Not to guide the conversation toward a known outcome. But to stay with the person long enough for something real to emerge.

    Sometimes help doesn’t feel like help. Noticing that is a starting point, not failure.

  • Don’t take a photo if you want to remember

    Presence is the memory

    I’ve had a smartphone for years. I do take photos. Just not of everything — and I don’t share them with everyone.

    The problem isn’t photography. It’s what happens when documenting replaces paying attention. The moment a camera comes out, something shifts. We start framing instead of feeling, managing instead of being present. The camera doesn’t just record the moment; it changes it.

    Some experiences imprint themselves precisely because they are fully lived. When we rely on photos to remember, we often remember less. Attention gets outsourced. Memory weakens. If the phone is doing the remembering for us, we don’t have to.

    When my son and I talk about Paris, we don’t scroll through images. We describe it to each other. What we noticed. How it felt. What stayed. The memory lives in language, not pixels. It remains active, shared, alive.

    What unsettles me isn’t the photo itself, but the need to show everything. Why does every moment require an audience? Why do we feel compelled to prove that we were somewhere, that something mattered? And why does the approval — the likes, the hearts — feel so good?

    That rush is not harmless. It trains us to measure experience by reaction rather than meaning. Moments become performances. Memory becomes external, dependent on validation.

    I take photos when something calls for it. I keep many of them private. Some I never looked at again. They exist as quiet markers, not content. And many moments are left unrecorded entirely — because they deserve full attention.

    Not everything needs to be captured.
    Not everything needs to be shared.
    Some things are meant to be remembered by being lived.

  • Love Education

    Love Education

    None of us is shown or taught how to love, but we should be. We may learn facts and skills in life, but rarely do we learn the deeper skill of loving. We can choose to live without sex, but we can’t live without love. How to love deeply and broadly is what we need—and what the Earth needs too. We must learn how to love strangers, how to love nature, and how to love everything we encounter.

    Our goal in life should be to make love. Not just in the romantic or physical sense, but in the way we move through the world. We can learn to live in love without being in love. Turning living into loving is a lifelong path.

    Yet society’s idea of love often misleads us. We are taught that love is something that happens to us, a reaction when we encounter something “deserving” of love. But deep love is not a rare event to wait for—it is something we practice. Don’t wait for the big love. Love the ordinary people and the small things. Loving the ordinary makes it extraordinary. Saving your love until something better comes along is not loving at all.

    If your culture has taught you to hold back—to wait, to make sure who or whatever is “worthy” before you give love—what are you losing out on? Love is not a prize to be earned. Love is a decision. Love is action. Love is a choice you make again and again. And there is no need to be loved back in order to love.

    We should also be careful not to mistake love for its imitations. To seduce is to lead astray—to try to make someone become who we want them to be, instead of loving who they really are.

    True love goes deeper. True love is core love. True love is mutual love. We don’t simply fall in love—we practice love. To love takes energy, especially when love awakens feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, or vulnerability. Real love takes work.

    And yet, this work transforms us. When we are courageous enough to be ourselves with another, to grow and change together, love keeps growing. Passion can ripen into something more real when we dare to take the risk of loving fully. Because real love changes us.

    It is only when we dare to have our heart broken that we can truly love. True love gives and forgives.

  • We’re All Part of the Broken Family

    I read your words, and I felt something shift—not in the way I imagine you intended. You said what you needed to say, and I suppose this is me doing the same. Skriva av mig.

    You write with the tone of someone who’s already moved on, who’s emotionally detached and looking back at the wreckage from a safe, elevated distance. But I didn’t feel wisdom in your letter. I didn’t feel love. I felt something performative. Something self-satisfied. You used to be someone I admired for your depth—for your ability to hold contradictions, for your courage to look at the mess and not turn away. This felt like the opposite. This felt like someone writing to win a crowd, not seek the truth.

    You compared America to a mentally ill family member. That’s not philosophy, that’s pathologizing a people. That’s taking the worst of one nation and building a metaphor that makes everyone else the sane, stable, rational grownups. Europe becomes the wise wife. Canada, the pretty girl next door. Russia, the neighbourhood monster. And you? You’re the knowing observer, shaking your head in sorrow from your morally secure porch.

    You’ve written off an entire nation as if it’s a single consciousness—chaotic, erratic, no longer trustworthy. That’s not just lazy, it’s dangerous. It flattens the millions of people in that country who are fighting the good fight. Who are pushing back. Who are trying to hold something together while the ground shifts beneath them. You saw the storm, and instead of offering a rope, you stepped back to watch.

    And meanwhile, Europe—your golden child in this metaphor—gets a free pass. No mention of its own ongoing nationalism. No mention of how it’s leaned on the US for security, convenience, and political cover for decades. No mention of its own violent history or its complicity in the very global order you now denounce. It’s easier, I guess, to pretend Europe is rising like a phoenix while America flails.

    But this isn’t healing. This isn’t insight. It’s resignation dressed up as moral clarity.

    You say you haven’t given up on America, that your door is open. But everything in your letter says otherwise. You’ve already packed the bags, changed the locks, and started dating someone new. What remains is the guilt talking, not the love.

    I don’t say this as a flag-waver or an apologist. I see the mess. I feel the grief. But I also see the reductionism, the projection, the convenient forgetting. And that—coming from someone who claims to be a philosopher—is what stings the most.

    If you want to walk away, fine. But don’t pretend it’s out of compassion. And don’t pretend you’re not part of the same broken family.

    We all are.

  • The Unexpected Calling: Life Taught Me How to Coach

    I never set out to be a trainer, facilitator or coach. In fact, I left school early, unsure of what I was meant to do in life. But years later — after raising children, working across care, tech, and the arts, and returning to education myself — I discovered something surprising: I love helping people learn and grow. Not just the material, but about themselves.

    Over the past decade, I’ve taken courses in communication, mental health, and life coaching to deepen the insight I’ve gained from choosing a different path in life. I’ve been told often, “You should be a teacher,” but I think what people really meant is: “You make others feel understood.”

    That, to me, is the foundation of real learning — being seen, heard, and accepted. Whether someone is 14 or 80, I’ve found that the desire is the same: we want to be understood.

    The traditional school system didn’t make space for that when I was young. I didn’t like school, but I remember the rare teachers who took the time to understand me. Inspired by books like Tuesdays with Morrie, I’ve since reached out to thank them. Because they didn’t just teach me Swedish and English — they made me feel I mattered.

    That’s what I aim to offer others now. Whether I’m coaching, facilitating, or designing a training, my approach is rooted in one belief: understanding people is just as important as knowing the material. When someone feels seen, they’re far more likely to feel safe, ask questions, and learn something new — not just in their minds, but in their lives.

    Too many adults carry a quiet belief that they’re “not smart enough.” That’s rarely true. More often, they were simply misunderstood — taught in a way that didn’t match how they learn. If I can help someone reconnect with their curiosity, or feel good about learning and growing again, that’s enough.