…and I could never have known!
On a chilly October weekend, I started reading an article titled “Icebreakers – Cracking Stuff” in The Economist, which began with the line “Finland has something America wants.”
I kept reading, expecting to find something about the current Greenland agenda. Then I came across a sentence by Jari Hurttia that struck me:
“Ice is a kind of mystery.”
Yes — ice, snow, winter, the cold — all are mysteries to those who have never truly experienced them.
My hometown is a beautiful coastal city along the Mediterranean. I grew up with heat, endless sunshine, tanned skin, fresh vegetables and fruits, seafood culture, and countless touristic moments even without leaving my own circle.
Tourists I met throughout my life would always tell me, “You’re so lucky — you live a full-time holiday life.”
But that never meant much to me. This climate was simply my natural habitat, my everyday normal.
For me, a holiday meant snow and winter — that postcard-perfect scene almost impossible to experience in my city.
It has never snowed in my hometown. True winter existed only as a flawless concept in my mind. To let us experience it, our municipality used to bring real snow from the mountains by lorries — quite literally!
When I first saw snow actually falling from the sky, I felt as if I were inside a snow globe. Those tiny cotton candies were drifting down, melting on my hands. The white blanket they created. The silence that followed. The chill that reached my bones.
I wasn’t sweating — I was freezing! And it felt like another way of being alive. It was such a miracle.
“God, please let me experience this white miracle all my life,” I used to pray. “Please bless me with real winter — I already have enough summer.” That was my childish bargain with God.
In my city, people had to drive up to higher altitudes to see the snow. Winter — real winter — was our luxury, our privilege. You had to make an effort to reach that miracle. Years later, I became fascinated by other winter wonderlands. Finland was, of course, one of them.
One day, I met a Finnish girl in my hometown. She told me, “You have no idea how lucky you are to be from the Mediterranean.”
Maybe she was right. That conversation stayed with me for years — because it showed how easily we idealize what we don’t live in.
Years later, when I visited Finland, I told a Finnish man, “You have no idea how lucky you are to be from Finland.”
We always reveal our nature in what we admire. What we cannot easily reach always feels more precious.
Perhaps this is how distance creates desire — the snow for me, the sun for them.
Or maybe these contrasts keep the world in balance — they make us curious enough to leave our own comfort zones and seek the lives that feel like our idealized opposites.
We rarely learn to appreciate what we already have — maybe because, as I once prayed in my childhood, we already have it, and we know we won’t lose it.
And back where I come from, the waves never stop whispering that we all long for what’s beyond our horizon.
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Between Everywhere and Nowhere 
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