Some thoughts on things “working out” (aka– ‘þetta reddast’)

If you google “Iceland national motto,”—and why wouldn’t you?—you’ll encounter the phrase þetta reddast (roughly pronounced, “theta re-dust”). Exact translations vary—everything will work out in the end, don't worry, it's going to be okay, etc. As Icelander Auður from the “I heart Reykjavík” newsletter and blog describes it, it’s more than a phrase, but a philosophy or way of life. Basically, she says, “you can use it for any seamlessly hopeless situation.” 

I had read about this motto many times before coming to Iceland—it’s been written about widely and was the subject of a BBC story early in pandemic times—I roughly thought about it in a “no worries” shorthand. However, I’ve appreciated seeing more of the nuance behind the mindset close up as it plays out in daily life here, and what it illuminates about differences in the Icelandic perspective on the world. 

Many analyses of the origins of this philosophy center on the Icelandic dependency on the land and the mindset that comes from being at the mercy of extreme natural forces so clearly beyond human control—volcanic eruptions, the arrival of sudden blizzards, earthquakes, tempestuous seas, etc. There is no avoiding the power of nature here. Related, a perhaps secondary motto of the country is: “if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes” as it will likely change. I felt this acutely biking home from the pool in relatively nearby Grenivík yesterday in my full body lime green snowsuit. What had looked like a light rain at the start of my journey had morphed into a lateral sleet shower by the end of my swim as I sat in the outdoor  hot pot with a dad and his three kids, enjoying the incongruous elements. As I started biking home, the accompanying winds blew me gently off the road and into the softly sloping dirt embankment. I was physically fine, however, and was more in curious awe at the force of the wind, having never felt something quite like that before. I wasn’t too cold, or hurt, so, þetta reddast, I got off the bike and walked for a bit until I went over a hump in the road, and the mountains again provided more of a shelter from the northern winds so that I could get back on. 

In watching the “þetta reddast” mindset in action, two elements strike me. One–to me, it does  not seem synonymous with the Lion King-esque “hakuna matata”/”no worries” phrase. This comparison just struck me while watching the most recent hyper-realistic Lion King remake with middle daughter Rakel. It’s her favorite movie, and we watched it dubbed into Icelandic with English subtitles, much of which I missed as a beginning knitter trying to multi-task along with her. Luckily, I knew the plot line. (Side note: I suppose it is fairly arbitrary what human language non-human animals should speak, but for some reason seeing lions sing in Icelandic just struck me as extra incongruous and charming). So it’s not that þetta reddast means taking a laissez faire approach to things being magically perfect on their own. On the contrary, with every element of farm life, there is so much attention, pre-planning, care, and contingency preparation involved with tending to land and animals. But even with all this effort, still, inevitably not everything will go as you hope or expect. When talking about a plan to herd on foot a group of high mountain perched sheep, to finish harvesting a field of potatoes in a day, or the like, Anna will often say: “at least, we try” with a wry smile that seems to suggest acceptance that the universe may have other plans. 

An example: One time this summer I was coming back from a beautiful run south of the farm through the sheep fields, and I took a new route home  alongside the road, through the ankle deep wild blueberry bushes parallelling the farm. I saw the potato tractor plowing along, and thought it was a great vantage point to take a picture. As I was getting out my phone, however, I realized the potato harvest machine had begun to tilt at an unnatural angle, leaning slowly to the side with the right side wheels lifting unnaturally off the ground. I saw Mathilde and Marissa in the distance in their two blue work suits, jump to the ground, back up, and eventually begin to walk back to the house. I was relieved they seemed to be okay, but worried, and continued running back to the farm house to meet them. 

“Are you okay?!” I asked breathlessly when I met them in the mud room, disrobing. “What happened?!?” braced for this to be a disaster that would derail the rest of the harvest. 

They nervously laughed: “We’re okay!” They assured. “The potato machine just sort of started tipping as we rounded the base of the slanted field!” said Mathilde. 

“At first I thought it was just a little tilt,” echoed Marissa, but then Anna told us to get off and get clear! She came around and looked at it and said: ‘Well, that was not the plan…’”

Far from catastrophizing, however, Anna simply came back to the barn, got out one of the smaller forklifts, drove that back out to the field, and was able to maneuver it to pull down the lifted side of the tractor so that we could continue later in the day. Þetta reddast.

Tangent… the girls’ experience on the back of the tractor took me back to when I was a freshman in high school, on a fall soccer retreat, staying with my team at the vacation home of a wealthy patron of the Salem soccer community on Devil’s Lake near the Oregon Coast. He let teams stay for free every fall as a kind of pre-season bonding activity, and would also take kids out for inner tubing joy rides on the back of his fancy speed boat, replete with custom subwoofers for musical accompaniment. We soon realized the hard way, however, that his bank account outweighed his boating expertise when, on our first boating ride, he turned too abruptly back into his own wake and a wave of water came over the stern. At first, we all laughed at the cold and thrill of getting wet, until we realized the bow was tilted up at an unnatural angle toward the sky. He looked at us with a slightly panicked seriousness: “Um, ok, so now you all need to jump!” he commanded. We were in the middle of the lake, but did as instructed. As we bobbed in the water, watching the boat slowly sink below view, the heavy bass of 90s Notorious B.I.G./Puff Daddy classic, “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” that had been serenading our pleasure ride became slowly garbled as the speakers were subsumed in water. Most people had life jackets within reach, or at least were confident swimmers, so everyone got to shore unscathed. We made it home to frightened onlookers though who, from the deck of the house on the far side of the lake, had just seen the boat sink in front of their eyes. The owner called a specialty crane company that came out later that same day and were able to fetch the boat from the bottom of the lake– a process we later learned he had done before. In youthful appreciation for almost drowning us, a group of us somehow also ended up volunteering to clean his boat once it was back in the driveway, rinsing it of seaweed and other bottom of lake detritus including a live fish we found flopping in one of the side compartments. Now there’s a guy who perhaps could have used a little less ‘þetta reddast’ mentality. 

A second element about the þetta reddast mindset that has struck me is just the difference here in the expectation of ease of life in general. As a Seattlite and avid listener of podcasts, the highest goods seem to be whatever makes life easier, quicker, more efficient, painless and friction free. Apps like “Seamless” have this promise of ease even embedded into their name. What exactly all this convenience is freeing us up to actually do is not usually answered, but whatever it is, the implied assumption is that whatever it is about daily life that is effortful is experienced as both frustrating and stressful. Take away that insistence of ease however, and perhaps the stress is diminished. If I expect something to be hard, I’m not surprised or unnerved to find it thus. If I don’t expect the world to conform to my specific needs and expectations, I shouldn’t take it personally, nor find it particularly upsetting, when it doesn’t. I often ask the middle daughter, Rakel, here, about farm questions, especially about parts of the year I haven’t seen in action. I.e.: How do you help 300+ sheep all have babies in the same two week time period in May? How do you get the rams to mate with the sheep you intend? How do you catch sheep in the middle of winter and carry them home on your lap on a snowmobile? (The latter of which her younger sister, Silla, showed me an actual video from last February). Rakel is very patient and generous with her energies to explain, and the first two words she often repeats, with a smile, are: “not easy.” 

I know we are all so much the products of our environment and I know once I’m home I will easily lapse into frustration with traffic, impatience in the grocery store, annoyance with the Northwest whether and the like, but I hope that in addition to whatever tangible souvenirs I bring home, (i.e.-- my window display here of found natural history museum souvenirs: bones, shells, skulls and other sea-side remnants from whales, arctic foxes, birds, sheep and seals is really progressing, I must say!) I also hope that some ephemeral residual þetta reddast perspective worms its way into me as well.