One Word

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One Word

My father, Will Stalbrand (nobody has ever been able to discover how he managed to be called Will when his real name was Bertil, but that is another story) had been an engineer working as one of the Director of a huge industrial Air Conditioning Company, Fläktfabriken. What my father had wished more than anything else in life, was that I would not become dependent of the whims of a boss. He thought that I should try and become a dentist, who could annoy a dentist and who would refuse to become very very rich? So why not, except that fate had neither provided me with the hands nor the nerves needed to become dentist.

When it was ascertained that the dentistry profession would not be greatly improved by my contribution, I told him that I wanted to become an agronomist, which may have come as a bit of a surprise as my father knew that I could not make the difference between a potato and a maize plant. That total lack of knowledge was to remain my trademark for all my life, it taught me one good skill, how to mention things by name without using the name, so I carefully avoided being trapped into recognizing plants. Possibly life had foreseen that as the only plant I would ever have to work with was maize, which does not call for huge knowledge bases to be recognized.

It took me three years of labour for to work my way up to the point where I would be accepted by the Swedish Agricultural College. No, I did not bribe them to be accepted. But do not ask me why and how I came to be accepted as a student in agronomy.

So, I had made it, I was now in the Regional Agricultural College, next year I would be in the National Agricultural College in the Great University Town of Uppsala.

In fact it was a bit of a joke as I did not care at all about Agriculture, from my point of view cows could produce milk or wine or olive oil, it made no difference to me. I wanted to study soils and soil conservation and as Life loves playing joke, that subject would only be on the agenda ten to twenty years later; going through the whole of Agriculture was the only way to approach Soils, as to Soil Conservation, it did not even exist.

So, here I was reluctantly sitting in the Regional Agricultural College, surrounded by students who had spent all their life on farms, I was the first one of a new breed of students, and if I can give you an advice, never be the first one of anything, I was the first agricultural student to come from town. What a big laugh for my fellow students!

I was sitting in the course of Agricultural Economy. One word was going to change my life, how could I know it, there had been no writing on the wall, Agricultural Economy with its balance sheets was a bore.

One word to change a life and no warning.

It must have been a course on the subject of farm building; Or rather the economics of building a new unit.

The teacher, a rather young and enthusiastic teacher, asked a question:

<< what is a house? >>

Sounded like a stupid question, what is a house? So we started lining up all the standard answers, who cared, a house is made of four walls, a house has a roof, a house is something that protects, a house is something that encloses an area; Which could have been the right answer.

Then the teacher gave us the answer he was looking for, not telling us that it was the right answer, just telling us that it was a way to look at a problem.

<< A house is a compromise >>

I cannot say that he received a standing ovation for that affirmation.

Then the class began to explore this affirmation, exploring the compromises that had to be done when conceiving or buying a house. It brought us in direct contact with reality; we began to see with our mind and reasoning, the difference between what we wished and what we could afford.

When that courses ended, I was the same man as the one who entered, I did no feel like a man who had seen the light or received a divine message, I was rather like a bored Moses complaining about the weight of these total useless tables he had received while everybody knew he used to eat on the floor, and had no need for heavy tables.

Many seeds are planted so deep that it will take a long long time for them to germinate. I was lucky, that seed was not smothered by bushes, it did not fall on a hard stone, the more I advanced, the more I realized that all solutions were a compromise.