If something isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or doesn’t exist. A lot of us are tangled in this social media life where every meal you eat has to be pictured and uploaded, every trip you take need to be documented and every person you spend your time with, needs to show up on your facebook feed. We search for travel information, research data and try and find a person we lost contact with years ago, and if a simple google search doesn’t yield results, the thing might as well not exist at all. It’s a flawed mentality.
What inspired me to ponder about this issue was one Finnish word: kirnahanki.
There is no translation to English for it, not to my knowledge, but it means springtime snow that has melted and then hardened so much that it can carry your weight if you walk or ski on it. We have a lot of words related to snow and ice here in Finland, and not many of them can be translated to English, so that really isn’t surprising, but what surprised me was that google didn’t know the word either. I’m not sure why I even tried, but when I googled the word, there were no results. None. That is odd. Kirnahanki is very familiar to me but I started to wonder if I had made it up because it didn’t show up on a google search at all. I went to my mom for confirmation, and then to my great aunt, and they both knew the word, so it must exist. We speak a certain dialect here in the northern parts of central Finland, and I would be interested to know if anyone in other regions of Finland know the word kirnahanki, or what is your word for it.
It was a good reminder for myself that not everything is, or even needs to be online. There is life outside the internet and it’s all real. There is a lot going on and not everything needs to be put up on social media or on a blog post, not ever if you are a blogger (ahem…)
People have connections outside of facebook friends, there are important life events that don’t all need to be documented online in real time and there is a lot of information out there that you will not find out with a google search. You will actually have to go outside, live and find out about life while you are at it.