Although my mother was born and raised in Canada, both of her parents were Icelandic. She grew up in an “Icelandic” household (Icelandic food, language, customs) and so when it came to raising my brother and I, I think she always considered it her duty to instill us with some sense of Icelandic culture.

She did so by celebrating Icelandic Christmas traditions, participating in Icelandic-Canadian events and integrating the occasional Icelandic word into our everyday vocabulary but there is one Icelandic trait she passed on to me that I do not even think she realized was Icelandic.

For years she has been telling me that if I find myself it a stressful situation, just repeat the phrase: “Everything will work out; it always does.”

The other day when I was reading Nanna’s column, the words of the Icelandic saying, “thetta reddast,” or “It’ll work out,” jumped off of the page.

I cannot remember ever having heard this Icelandic saying (even if I had I probably would not have understood it anyhow), but the mindset of “It’ll work out” is something I have most certainly experienced firsthand in Iceland.

Looking through the lens of “thetta reddast,” if someone is a few minutes late for a meeting here, it is not necessarily because they are being inconsiderate. Rather I think that in many cases, all that is running through their minds is, “What’s five or ten minutes? I will get there and the meeting will take place all the same.”

In fact, I doubt if that is running through their minds at all. I think it is just a built-in practical way of looking at things. But what really makes this work is that it goes both ways: they will be just as understanding if they end up waiting a few minutes for someone else to show up.

I have not yet been able to successfully adopt this Icelandic habit seeing as how I am perpetually 15 minutes early for everything. I have noticed that I seem to be more stressed over the “little things” than the average Icelander. When it comes to deadlines and punctuality I become rather rigid and tense.

I am making progress though; when I first arrived in Iceland and was not familiar with the city, I was closer to 20 or 30 minutes early for all appointments. At this pace, in another five years, I should be able to show up right on time with not a minute to spare.

Another area where I have found the “thetta reddast” philosophy in Iceland is within the bureaucratic system. In Canada I was taught that deadlines are final, and there is generally no room for error.

That is not to say the clerk or person in charge is not sympathetic to my situation, but rules are rules and although they would love to help, “they just can’t do anything.”

In Iceland I have learned that “no” does not always mean “no.” There are times when you can talk to the person in charge, explain your situation, and chances are if you have made an honest mistake and are not trying to blatantly abuse the system, or, the person you are talking to can see the rules they are enforcing are indeed absurd, they will help you out and slightly bend the rules.

They seem to understand human error and are willing to *gasp* bend or even break the rules. So, knowing a deadline has been missed is no reason to have a melt-down because “thetta reddast.”

And it is not only foreigners like me who see this window of opportunity. I am friends with an Icelandic woman who owns her own business. A few months ago this woman moved to the US and just the other day she came across an Icelandic grant that she was eligible to apply for.

However, upon closer further inspection, she saw that the deadline had come and gone by a few weeks. We were speaking on the phone recently and she told me that she was still going to fill out the forms and send them in, making sure she followed up with a telephone call to the person in charge of applications.

She said, “In Iceland a few weeks doesn’t mean a thing; if I talk to them I still might be able to get them to accept it. But, wow, here in the US they sure don’t budge an inch!”

It is true that this gray area that exists within the Icelandic system brings up all sorts of moral questions. If you do not possess the connections or language skills to talk your way out of a problem you will find deadlines remain final and many doors will stay firmly shut.

But the gray remains all the same.

All in all, I think that a “thetta reddast” approach to life is the way to go. I aspire to achieve this sense of calm in lieu of my occasional stress attacks, and nights I lay awake revising task lists and potential problems that may or may not have occurred yet.

Now that I am pregnant I am much more aware of what I am feeling and I’m trying to take it easy. My husband is the king of living by the code of “what will be, will be” and I certainly hope our child inherits his dominant “thetta reddast” gene. But who knows, maybe I have a recessive gene to pass on somewhere in there… 

Alana Odegard – odegard_a@hotmail.com