Nils Mustelin
is wondering:

Why am I here?


Photo by
Matias Uusikylä
(September 2000)
Earth and Moon
   Nils Mustelin
               www.mustelin.net
The beautiful picture of our double planet Earth and Moon
was taken by the spaceprobe Galileo on its way to Jupiter (NASA)


Spider in the web

Yes indeed – why am I here?

This question could of course be understood in a very profound sense: Why do I exist at all – why have I been born as a human being precisely at this epoch and on this small planet in a Universe billions of years old and containing billions of stars and galaxies? Or, as Moominpappa put it when he was still a small curious child in the Hemulen's bleak orphanage for moomin foundlings: Why am I the one I am and not somebody else? Why is everything as it is and not quite the opposite?

Unfortunately, I have to disappoint the reader with a keen interest in matters philosophical or metaphysical. What I mean is simply: Why am I here on the internet – in the spider's web? Why have I taken all the trouble to construct this website and to compile information about myself to be looked at by any websurfer?

Well – it all began when I was nominated as a candidate in the parliamentary election to be held here in Finland in March 1999. In that situation I found it appropriate to introduce myself to the voters in this modern and fashionable way. When I had, however, learned how to use the HTML language and could start planning and constructing webpages of my own, I was carried away by the joy of creating!

I found it quite rewarding to describe what I have achieved and which ideas I have been fighting for, to tell about my roots and my family, to remember people who have been important to me – and to transform these facts and memories into documents that might conceivably interest also others than those directly concerned.

The result of this admittedly somewhat narcissistic pottering was a rather extensive collection of webpages, many-coloured and inconsistent as life itself but nevertheless forming some kind of portrait of their author.

In the parliamentary election I did not get enough votes to be elected, but in the spring of 2000 I accepted a candidature for the municipal elections to be held in October. This gave me another excuse for maintaining and further expanding this site. (Oh yes – thanks for asking – I was indeed reelected as a member of the Helsinki City Council for the period 2001-2004!)

I have written all the texts in Swedish, which is my mother tongue, and most of them have also been translated into Finnish. Thus, my website is essentially bilingual. The Finnish and the Swedish channels both start from my Welcome Page and remain separate, but there are frequent cross-over links between them.

As Finnish and Swedish are the national languages of Finland, and as I think that rather few people in other countries would be interested in my pages, I haven't as yet felt any compelling need for an English translation.

Thus, if you do not read either Swedish (SVENSKA) or Finnish (SUOMI), I can only apologize and thank you for honouring my site by visiting it. But, as I already told you on my Welcome page: If you have an adventurous mind, you may nevertheless wish to jump back into my pool and from there take a stroll along either one of the two language channels! I assure you that you are most warmly


! ! !


Or you may wish to send me a friendly E-mail message and comment on my website – or even try to persuade me to publish some more information in English... Here is my address:

nils.mustelin@dlc.fi

Last update: 6 September 2002