running on gentle Power-

Life is an ultramarathon. The best path is to access your sisu and keep your heart open.

-  STEPHEN KIESLING

Elisabet Lahti researched her doctoral thesis by running across New Zealand. Her subject was sisu, the Finnish concept of resilience, determination, and hidden reserves. She helped a lot of people along the wayand learned lessons worth sharing.

"What we humans have that's special is our awareness, our ability to notice, 'Oh, this is what happening-whatever it is and be courageous, stay loving, and keep an open heart."

Let’s start with the large bear in the room. Sisu first arrived in America as a front-page headline in The New York Times in 1940 when Finland held off the Soviet army during what’s called the Winter War. Back then, sisu was hailed as the “frozen grit” that turned back the Soviet tanks. I think most of us believed that kind of sisu would not be called upon today. Yes. None of what is happening now in Ukraine was happening when I was writing my book, so I don’t touch on it. I’m also a pacifist, and my personal preference is not to write about war. The Winter War was such a dire situation. It was 35 degrees below zero and people were fighting for their lives against terrible odds. To write about that as a case study for how to use sisu in daily life felt to me like I was not honoring what happened. But, yes. Sisu means doing what you absolutely have to do in the moment; it means digging into reserves within yourself that you didn’t know you had. The Winter War is famous because regular people were digging into reserves that most people can’t even imagine having— and yet we do. We all do. That’s what sisu is about.