Reijo Elsner Interviewed by Guy Hoffman
Guy: You mentioned
in one of our communications that you and your daughter were preparing a meal
together. Could you tell me how your relationship is with your
daughter?
Reijo: That is a straight question! We don't often cook
together, but it is a nice thing when we do!
Well, she is right now in
her teens and I have been pushing her to start asking what she really wants to
do when she 'grows up'. Not an easy thing to get going, but it has resulted in
her starting to ask the question of herself for a couple of years now. It has
also led to some talks and trials already at 15, which is great. This is very
pleasing for me, a father of four, whose other four children are now all well
over 30. It is the first time when the question has really become alive for one
of my children.
I am. though, not satisfied with what I've been able to
do for her. Some things are under our control and some are not. For a year she
has had her health problems with asthma and allergies, but they certainly have
taught her how to take care of herself a little. A small detail on this is that
on advice from her mother they both took up Yoga, which seems to help my
daughter. The sad thing in that is that I consider myself quite a good Yoga
teacher, but they don't want to know!
I am making efforts in not
expressing negative emotions to her and trying to give her the kind of 'physical
care' with small things around the house, serving, caring. This process has been
rewarding and continuously bringing up things that are not right with me. But I
try. Fighting with myself does not come as natural as fighting with
others.
Wait a minute, I've counted the children again and have found out
that I am a father of five....
Guy: (Laughing) Okay, what I'm really
interested in is how has the Gurdjieff Work influenced you in your relations
with your children?
Reijo: I don't know how you do it Guy, but this is a
question I've had somewhere, only it never came up to surface. Perhaps the
reason is that the truth is so unbearable. The immediate answer is that I sense
that all my own children think that I am a very strange person with my interest
in Gurdjieff, who is so little known and of whom they only have heard of from
their father. I have not pushed the teaching down their throats at any time and
they don't really know what it is all about.
And yet the influence of the
parents on children is so important - that is where things start going wrong and
instead of 'educating' my children in the way that I know they could have been
educated, they have not received from me perhaps not even as much as I received
from my own parents. I really feel that. The situation has been like this in
spite of all the knowledge. The basic feeling has been right, but the practical
approach contained in the wise saying 'charity begins at home' has not been
exercised very much. My friend Malcolm Gibson put it in a nice way: "use your
body, not your tongue."
I am learning rather to give to others. Today my
daughter told me that she really thinks it is good that I do the cooking and
serve it. Only thing she hopes is that I could do it 'right to the very end and
serve the food with a smile in a polite manner'. She is absolutely right: I am
not good at this. It is as if service is something that I hate more than
anything.
Have I answered you? Or have I avoided the answer?
Guy: Why do you think it is so difficult to do the Work in a family
situation?
Reijo: The word family looks very similar to familiar - at
least the similarity between these two words points out to the difficulty. In a
familiar situation I am more identified with the wrong idea of myself. There is
a beautiful Finnish folk-saying about marriage: 'the devil dances nowhere as
much as around a couple'.
If we use the word 'love' instead of 'work' I
think it is easier for me to understand this (although one could argue that
these two words mean the same thing - depending on the circumstances). The love
based on the usual kind of self-love, in which we 'fall in and out of love', is
with us in all situations and in a more concrete way within a family. You give
something and expect something in return. You expect a reward, a price, a
present or a prize.
I come inevitably back to the question 'what do I
want' or even 'what do I need'. The question is the same when it concerns the
other members of the family. In the same way that I find it almost impossible to
keep asking myself what I want, I also find it very difficult to ask what my
wife wants and needs and what my daughter wants and needs. I am now reminded of
this same time a year ago when you asked me if it would not be a good idea to
make a Work Wish for the next year, something I wished. That worked fine and I
am still wishing and working on that impulse. I'm talking of fairy-tale like
wishes becoming true and for this it is important for me to try to find out what
my family wants, needs and wishes, but it is not easy.
Guy: Are you
presently working on a specific Work idea when it comes to your
family?
Reijo: Yes, on different ideas, but only one idea a time, one a
day. I have become convinced that working on many things at once is something I
cannot do. This may well be individual, but I can't work on more than one thing
properly.
What I am trying to do is what we discussed before - to serve.
This is not easy either. I don't quite understand why it is so difficult; it is
like I am trying to do something that is going 'against the grain'. At the same
time I have previously had the idea from business life that I am quite good at
this. I've mainly done selling, which I consider to be also a service function
for both the buying and the selling companies. These two 'services', what I am
trying to do at home and what I have done at work as a seller, are not so
different from each other. The differences, why I have had success at work and
failure at home, are caused by two completely different persons, the tyrant at
home and the nice guy at work.
I have of course often seen this in other
people and have been quick to remark to my wife, when she has had a negative
outburst after a hard day at work, that she should save the negativity for the
job and behave properly at home.
So I could sum this up by saying that I
am attempting to behave like a man!
Guy: From my own observations of
being married three times, I'm beginning to understand that being married, or
having an intimate relationship, somehow is related to the struggle of
reconciling two opposing forces. Does this in anyway coincide with your thoughts
on the subject?
Reijo: Definitely! At least in the sense that in marriage
the couple keeps opposing each other much of the time. One may ask if the five
marriages between us means that we are the experts? We cannot be called
amateurs; we are more like the professionals! At least I am a professional in
finding out the faults in my partner! I believe that my wife is on the level of
Xantippa in her criticism of me. I try to play the role of Socrates and take it
philosophically, but I do not always succeed in that. It could be a school, but
I am learning very slowly.
'Struggle of reconciling two opposing forces'
is an interesting way of putting it. Prior to the process of reconciling the two
there has been what I would call 'the attraction of two opposing forces'. My
'professionalism' tells me that the sexual and emotional attraction lasts for
some years, in my case about ten, and then it starts fading fast. It acts as the
third force, the reconciling force, as long as it is active in its role.
Afterwards it can more or less disappear or even change to its opposite, and
instead of the 'love' there was before we now have 'hate' that was not there in
the beginning.
My thoughts on marriage generally are that it is a
Christian concept. It is an institution, which goes against nature. The things
that go 'against nature' are those sort of things I mentioned before that are
going 'against the grain'. Going along the grain is the habitual, the machine
way. In the Gurdjieff sense if you put two machines together in a marriage what
happens? They are considered lucky if they manage to make many more machines
come into the world - nothing more really happens.
In some of the
not-too-public-Gurdjieff-group-meetings notes from the forties he gives the idea
of marriage in Asia: when the couple gets a child they are called brother and
sister, no longer husband and wife. This is a completely new life for the couple
where the only things that matter are not themselves, but the offspring. So they
have to die and be born themselves. This must have been also the Christian idea
of marriage - the reconciling of two opposite forces.
Guy: Thank you,
Reijo!