Stockholm Strömmen.
Stockholm is one of Europe’s five fastest growing cities and is the first European Green Capital 2010.
Text & Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro 2014
Many years ago I watched a man restore an antique wooden door. He had first carefully sanded it down to its original paint layer, til it was soft enough to run your hand over it, til you could feel the warmth of the wood at its core. To get the door to match the rest of the interior of the house, he then began by adding a thin layer of linseed oil. Each brush stroke was carefully calculated in pressure, length and weight.
I soon realized that he carried with him a tacit knowledge that not many others had. But more than tacit knowledge was also a genuine interest in what he was doing. He breathed life back into an antique door that most others would have thrown away and replaced with a brand new one from Bauhaus. He worked with undivided attention and as I watched, I pondered who else would ever come to appreciate the efforts? What came through clearly was that the care he put into that antique door was also a personality trait that you could see run through almost all other things he did.
I realized that this door might well outlive us both, at the cost of some linseed oil.