It is grey today, and it will be grey tomorrow, and it will continue to be grey forever.

The snow is all long gone, the temperature is above zero, and if it the days weren’t so short, you’d think we’ve left winter behind and moved on to not-winter-not-spring, March-ish or thereabouts.

Sunset at three o’clock in the afternoon.

Took a detour in the morning on my way to the train station, to get rid of some cardboard boxes. Got an unobstructed view of the rather pretty sunrise.

On the one hand, sunrise, nice.

On the other hand, the sun barely being up when I leave for work, not so nice.

Over two months to go before the days are of decent length again. Whose idea was it that humans should live this far north, anyway?

Crisp winter weather, with a decent blanket of snow and occasional clear skies, but only for three or four days. By Sunday evening, there will be warm weather and rain again.

We still have a whole month to go until the solstice but the days already feel so short.

For today’s dose of daylight I walked to the hidden wood. Not because it’s particularly interesting or beautiful at this time of the year; it’s not. What it does have is location. The wood is on a small hill, which gets me above the surrounding houses and into the reach of the sun’s last rays (at two o’clock in the afternoon).

It’s that time of the year where my energy levels dip, almost no matter what I do. I’m trying to get into the habit of going out in the daylight every day, even when it’s all gray and I don’t feel inspired at all.

Today was a sunny day, for a change, so I went for a longer walk after lunch. My half-hour circuit takes me to Starbo park; today I walked onwards to the Nälsta fields. This sculpture in the fields by Lena Lervik is titled “Venus and Nerthus biding their time”. Everybody knows Venus; this sculpture taught me that Nerthus (Nertus, Njärd, Njǫrðr) is a Germanic-Nordic fertility goddess. Here they’re both enjoying the last rays of the autumn sun, before it sinks below the trees in the west.

More happy pictures of glowing autumn trees. They’re almost luminous.

We had a team lunch with the Sortera team today, and walked from the office to the restaurant, with nice views along the way.

During dinner, our project manager – very clearly the most “people person” among us – kept the conversation interesting by throwing out questions. One of them was: what major event in your life has affected it the most?

Lives are, of course, full of pivotal events that make it change course. Had I gone to a different university, things would be different. Had I not met Eric, had I taken a different job, had I not quit my finance job for software engineering, had I not moved here and there – all of these changes would have ensured that I end up in a different place.

However, with all of those counterfactuals I can still imagine what life might be like. But there is one event so pivotal that, had things gone differently, I cannot even realistically picture how my life would be, and that is moving to Sweden.

The move was not my decision – I was only fifteen at the time and it was more or less just decided for me. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, because I wasn’t thinking in such terms, but the move was traumatic. As a teenager – a sensitive time in life – all of a sudden leaving behind my father, all my friends, what little extended family we had, everything that was familiar. New town, new country, new language, new school system, new teenage culture, new everything. And that in an era without internet or email or video calls or even normal phone calls back to Estonia (because international phone calls were prohibitively expensive). I remember regularly collapsing on a bed and sleeping for a few hours after getting home from school in the afternoon, because it was mentally so exhausting.

I coped, and I managed, but that one change has surely coloured everything that I have done since. Without it, I imagine would have lived a much steadier life. It took many years for me to feel fully confident and comfortable in Sweden, to stop feeling like an outsider trying to fit in. Plus for years we only had temporary residence permits, to be renewed every year or two, so there was always the threat of potentially being uprooted all over again and having to start over. And there was nobody to lean on. I had friends at school, but they were all new and thus superficial relationships, and I didn’t feel that I had much in common with most of them. I was very alone. I don’t think I can even pick out all the ways that this fundamental lack of security and support has affected my choices later in life.

There’s no control group to compare to. Have the challenges made me stronger in the end? Or would I have grown more if I’d had stable ground to stand upon? Who knows.

The move did of course broaden my horizons. One move led to another, and another – I spent a term in Belgium as an exchange student, seven years working in London, and months New York. I’ve travelled more and experienced more than I would have done if I had remained in Estonia. I doubt that I’d have climbed the Kilimanjaro, or gone diving in the Red Sea, or seen Yo-Yo Ma live in concert.

Trees in their full autumn glory everywhere. Cherries and maples are the awesomest.

Another misty morning, this time seen along the Tranebergsbron bridge.