First I would like to underline how I cherish all the experiences Slovakia and Bratislava have given me the past one and half years. I love living here, though it has ment being separated from my husband, family and friends leading lives in Finland. I'm positive I will yet be telling many stories about the incidents and observations I have made in here. But for too long the subject of creative thinking (and how it relates with living here) has tickeled on my tongue.
During the time I have lived and studied in Slovakia, I have come to notice that the major differences between our cultures might well be found from the area of creative thinking. One might now ask, what actually is creative thinking? Shortly put, for me it means especially the ability to come up with quick and useful solutions in situations where the anwers cannot be found from ready-made formulas or patterns used before. When inspecting it from this angle, I think it is not wrong to say we Finns are rather skilled in creative thinking. And why do I want to bring up this subject now? - Because I never realised it until it wasn't around me anymore. The most apt example how I came to notice the absence of creative thinking is the story including avocados...
For days me and my friend had been trying to find eatable avocados we could use in our salad. In the end of our grocery shopping one day, it was like a beam of light would have come down from the heaven upon the two lonely avocados - delicious, perfectly ripe avocados. With haste we added them into our shopping cart. We were so happy, already tasting them in our minds. In this food market all the veggies and fruits are weighed in the cash desks. The time for weighing the avocados came and somehow, the cashier couldn't find the code of the avocados from her list of fruits and vegetables. She went through the lists again and again, without trying to communicate with us in any way (probably she was intimidated byt foreign young women not speaking fluent slovak). After a while, she finally called some colleague to help. They went the lists through again, together. There was a code for green avocados, we could see it, but obviously the avocados we were trying to buy were not green but black. After ten minutes of talking amongst themselves and shrugging shoulders they decided they will not sell the avocados for us. Devastated, we were forced to move on from the cash desks, taking the final glimpse of the perfect avocados that stayed alone on the desk...
I couldn't believe it actually happened. Why couldn't they come up with some solution in selling them to us? Somehow I'm sure a similar situation in Finland would have ended up in us walking out WITH the avocados. A little touch of creative thiking would have saved our day.
I will not further analyze why is "thinking outside the box" so often such a rare phenomenon in Slovakia. I'm sure it has lot to do with cultural and historical background, but I leave those investigations for anthropologists. I also don't mean to say that creative thinking wouldn't exist here at all, ofcourse this is not the case. Instead I cannot help but asking, how could things change in Slovakia with active supporting and encouraging of creative thinking? Would people be generally more satisfied in everyday life? Would working communities become more dynamic? Would economic level start rising? I can only guess. Meantime, I suggest we Finnish people started valuing more our skills in creative thinking and nourishing them consciously in all fields of life.
