Yesterday When I Was Young

Today, I found my old diary from our “Honey Year – Around the world” -trip we made with my wife in 1989 after our wedding.

Between the pages, I found my passport photo that was taken in India on that trip. It was shot on the street with a pinhole camera made from black cardboard. Under the black cover, the photographer put the photo paper inside the camera and I had to stay still for a few seconds. After a few minutes, the photo was ready. Now, when I looked at myself in that photo, I can still see that relieved feeling on my face when we finally found that street corner where that man was taking those passport photos.

How much is left from that time’s Jouko? How much have I changed in these 30 years? Our body changes all the time, our 37 trillion cells regenerate throughout our lives. So, if my body has regenerated, what is left from the Jouko in this passport picture? If my brain has regenerated as well, what is left? Maybe my thoughts?

So I started reading my diary.

At first, I felt sympathy reading my short notes from those days. It was so clear that I was in a culture shock. Before our trip, my parents warned me not to go. They said: “Our son, look at the news on TV and you will understand how dangerous it is to go abroad. They are killing people over there, is that what you want?” But I had married a brave woman and I just had to follow her.

I kept on reading my diary and it sounded like a little boy’s thinking: “They don’t have toilet paper here in India.” “No even a toilet bowl!” ”Today I couldn’t find a trash can, one Indian man shouted to me ´Here is no trash can, this whole country is a big trash can!´ and then he was laughing!” In the beginning, I was so shocked that I hardly could draw anything in my diary. I had also made small pluses and minuses in my diary, depending on if the day had been good or bad. There were not so many plus marks.

However, when I read the text of the day when my passport photo was taken in India, I realized we had been traveling for three months then.

And that day I made my wife cry.

I had the first very happy feeling that day on our trip. It was a day without any fear. I just said: “People are good.” It was so big of a surprise to my wife that she started crying and she said: “Jouko. Now, this trip has paid for itself.”

As I forwarded reading my diary, the more tired and sad I got: When we had traveled seven months we arrived in Fiji Islands. I was reading about the day we got there and I remembered that before we started this whole trip we thought that Fiji must be the most exotic place in the world. And in Fiji, on our arrival, I had written in my diary that now, when in Fiji, I was really thinking how exotic Finland is with all darkness in winter and when it rains slush. I had finished that day’s text with a thought: “Exotism is always where you are not.”

After I had read through my one-year diary of Finland-India-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore-Australia-Fiji-USA-Finland, I remembered one moment from the trip. One evening in Udaipur, India. We went for a beer with our friend and ended up in this one view restaurant. The sky was full of stars and suddenly we saw a shooting star. Our Indian friend closed his eyes, put his hands to namaste, and prayed. We asked why he prayed and he said: “Always when you see a shooting star, it means that someone has died and the soul is going to heaven.”

My wife and I started eagerly to clear up for him that shooting stars just look like stars that quickly shoot across the sky but they are not stars and that in reality, shooting stars are just pieces of rock or space dust hitting Earth’s atmosphere from space. That it moves so fast that it heats up and glows as it speeds through the atmosphere.

Our Indian friend looked at us sadly and said: “No Magi and Jouko. Please, no. It is a soul. I remember how ashamed we were.

“Ignorance is bliss”, said my mother once, and continued: “The more you will know the more you will suffer.”