When I meet farmers or people whose work brings them in direct contact with the land, I invariably go away with the feeling that their passion for work makes them appreciate a sense of balance in life.
“Once our basic needs are met, we’re happy,” a farmer told me the other day. “You know something, more money doesn’t lead to more happiness,” another one said. This restrained pleasure, this lack of greed, is insightful at a time when capitalist luxuries have become a need.
The other day I came across a Swedish word – lagom – which means ‘adequate’, ‘just right,’ or ‘in balance’. Admittedly, it sounds like one of those coined baby names but it comes from the Viking phrase laget om, ‘around the team’, which essentially means that you should take only a sip of the mead (or beer or Twistees) that’s being passed around so that no one is left without.
The concept of lagom is burrowed deep into the Scandinavian national psyche. It encourages modesty and teamwork and discourages bling; hence the culture of fairness, consensus and equality.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the Norwegians, Danes and Swedes – they seem to take it in turns each year – are the happiest people in the world. With a conscientious mindset like that, it is very easy to see why they are the least corrupt country. It is not that they have something special in their genes which makes them less corrupt. They simply have strong ethical and moral structures in place to curb corruption, such as an independent and efficient police force, total disclosure of national deals to the public and authorities which respect the media.
Reasonable living conditions, of course help: their average annual wages and pensions are good. But there is also a subdued rejection of excess, that it’s not money which makes the world go round.
The concept of lagom is burrowed deep into the Scandinavian national psyche. It encourages modesty and teamwork and discourages bling
In fact, they have another thing which goes hand in hand with lagom and that is hygge. If you’re wondering how to pronounce that, all you have to do is imagine you’re watching a football game and instead of saying haqq, you say hugg and then to the deep guttural utterance you add an ‘a’: huugg-aa.
The word has no direct translation in English for this, although ‘cosy’ comes close. It derives from a 16th-century Norwegian term, hugga, meaning ‘to comfort’ or ‘to console’, which is related to the English word ‘hug’.
As it happens, Danish doctors recommend “tea and hygge” as a cure for the common cold. Hygge shares lagom’s reverence for measured experience: indulging in a piece of cake, but not outright gluttony; a dinner with friends at home, but nothing fancy; having a decent conversation and then some communal singing. Therefore hygge means being in the company of loved ones in a relaxed and intimate atmosphere, like a sanctuary in the middle of very real life.
Part of it has to do with house decor: lots of cushions and rugs and (unscented) candles. In fact every Dane burns six kilos of candle wax a year, not just at home but even in classrooms and office buildings – so much so that the Danish word for spoilsport is lyseslukker, which literally means ‘one who puts out the candles’.
But this is not some new 21st century feeling invented now so that Scandinavians can market themselves to the rest of the world. It’s always been there, even when cushions had yet to be invented. In Letter from Copenhagen, a 1957 article in The New Yorker, the writer Robert Shaplen reported that hygge was everywhere in the city: “The sidewalks are filled with smiling, hyggelige people, who keep lifting their hats to each other and who look at a stranger with an expression that indicates they wish they knew him well enough to lift their hats to him, too.”
Is there hygge here in Malta? I just came from the morning jog in Ta’ Qali where every morning we’re greeted by this chap who spits at us from across the road. In a minute I’ll be getting in the car to go to work and it will be a whirlwind trip of road rage and anger spewing all over (Scandinavians cycle a lot, maybe that’s the trick). We also don’t really do cosy and we prefer to go out for a buffet lunch in canteen style than staying inside for a spontaneous supper-on-the-sofa with friends. But that’s maybe got to do with the weather and the Mediterranean spirit.
What has nothing to do with our Mediterranean character is the fact that increasingly we are making money our ultimate aim and we are happy to close an eye to whichever means that money is obtained. Perhaps it is time we went back to basics, and embraced our national lagom once more.
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