Why we all need sisu – the Finnish concept of action and creativity in hard times

The Guardian

10-02-2025

In 2023, I was in the top 0.05% of Spotify listeners of Manic Street Preachers. It was one song on repeat. I would bet good money that there is no one in the world who has listened to their cover of Burt Bacharach's and Hal David's Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head as much as me.
No one except my daughter, who was also there as it played through the night, and through every nap, too, for the first 15 months of her life. Some babies need white noise to soothe them to sleep; mine needed my arms and James Dean Bradfield's voice. Astonishingly, despite this, I do not now hate the song – in fact, I quite like hearing it. If this column ever makes its way to you, James: thank you.
My child chose this song as some pick a favourite teddy. She was crying, being comforted by my husband, who was playing one of his (many, many) Manics albums, when the track changed; on came Raindrops. Within a few notes, she had stopped crying and started listening. My husband called me over and we stood in silence, amazed and a little giddy. As struggling new parents with a tiny baby who cried a lot, we were so relieved to find this gift that seemed to bring her a profound sense of consolation, that helped to bring her back to herself and to us.
We sang it a lot. I changed some of the words – our daughter's feet were too small for her bed, rather than too big – and I think the lyrics give crying a bad name. But, with some minor amends, this song became the soundtrack to her infancy and our early parenthood. After listening to it so many times, I came to hear within it some valuable indications for the building of a better life.
It's a simple melody, which could easily be saccharine in the wrong hands, but the Manics' cover has something special about it. I think it's because this recording embodies the subject of the song. The lyrics tell of a person who keeps getting caught in the rain, who refuses to let that defeat him and who finds freedom in the knowledge that happiness will return. But this song is not simply about that; it is that – the very sound of that freedom.
Raindrops was one of the first songs the Manics recorded after the disappearance of their dear friend and bandmate Richey Edwards, 30 years ago this month. I read that, in the aftermath of this traumatic loss, for a time, the band felt that they could not continue. But with the blessing of Edwards' family, and to the anger of some of their fans, they decided to keep making music.
This song was a radical act of survival. Bradfield's singing is the sound of growth through pain. I hear in it a refusal to lose oneself in the dark; music as an active choice of creativity and life amid devastation and grief. When you listen to it, even without knowing this backstory, it touches you – even my infant daughter felt something.
What I learned from my psychotherapy training, and again in early motherhood, is that every developmental leap is a grasping for freedom out of the pain of loss. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion understood that our very capacity to think in infancy grows out of our need to make sense of the loss of our mother's breast or our bottle at the end of every feed, and to bear that sense of separateness and aloneness. When we are drinking milk, there is no need to think. We can just enjoy feeling sated and merged; we have everything we need. But when we are hungry, we are driven to think of the breast or bottle that is no longer there. It is this difficult experience of longing for something we no longer have, this coming to tolerate the pain of separation, that necessitates the use of thought, propelling our minds into development.
I was recently lying in bed awake in the early hours, listening to Radio 4. The programme Something to Declare came on, about the Finnish concept of sisu, which the behavioural scientist Emilia Elisabet Lahti expresses as 'life force in times of adversity'. I understood this to be a more profound concept than resilience, which is often spoken of as a muscle we can train (snore). Sisu is the part of us that comes alive when we feel as if we have nothing left, when we think we cannot go on, but we do.
It struck me that this part of ourselves may well not exist prior to being necessitated into existence – like a thought, it is a capacity that grows in the moment of being needed. I think that's what happened to me when my daughter was born: out of the traumatic birth and the traumatic sleep deprivation and the traumatic everything else grew new capacities for survival and growth and love that I did not previously possess.
A better life won't always be a happier life. It will necessarily involve periods of extreme unhappiness and difficulty. That's the cost of doing business; sometimes it rains. A better life is not sitting there waiting for you to find it in an exercise routine or a therapist or a self-help book; it comes from living and loving and losing in freedom and in hope. If we can do that, there's no knowing when life's most meaningful moments might grace us. We might hear it in a few words of a radio programme in the lonely darkness of a sleepless night, or in a simple melody with the surprising power to console a crying baby, like light refracting through raindrops.
Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood
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