IN TODAY’S TURBULENT United States — with corrosive politics, anxiety about jobs, costly essentials, unaffordable health care, images of shooting after shooting — we all could use a little “sisu,” a Finnish can-do mindset in the face of adversity.
Pronounced “see-su,” with the emphasis on the first syllable, the concept has its origins in Finland’s not-so-distant past. The country shares an 800-mile border with Russia and twice fought the Soviet Union, from 1939 to 1940 and from 1941 to 1944, to keep its nation. The wars pitted a country with a population of less than 4 million against one with 194 million.
Outnumbered and outgunned, the Finns didn’t give up. They kept their nation — and embraced sisu as their national identity.
Sanna Luoma, owner of Sisu Outdoor School in Redmond, leads children across a bridge on a short hike while staffer Kathy Bravo helps from the back. Nature plays a role in sisu, the Finnish concept of resilience and grit in the face of adversity. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)
Not many Americans have heard of the term, unless they happened to catch a 2023 cult favorite called “Sisu,” one of the biggest global film hits ever to come out of Finland. (Rotten Tomatoes rates it a 94%.) The plot: As World War II is ending, a Finnish ex-commando, now a gold prospector, has his treasure stolen by Nazis. In gore-filled scenes, “the one-man death squad will go to outrageous lengths to get his gold back,” says the movie’s website. A sequel, “Sisu: Road to Revenge,” followed in September 2025.
In 1940, a piece in The New York Times tried to explain how sisu helped the country persevere in its war with the Soviets, but concluded, “Even the Finns have difficulty in defining it … it is a thing felt, like religion or love.”
I went searching for Finns in the Northwest who could explain the term sisu to the rest of us. My search including talking via WhatsApp with Juuso Luoto, 19, whose parents live in Fall City. The family moved here from Finland in 2016 when Microsoft bought Nokia’s mobile phone business. The dad, Juha Luoto, transferred as a program manager; he’s now with Amazon.
Juuso returned to the old country to complete his mandatory military service, which he began in June 2025 and will continue until March 2026. He’s with the Finnish Defence Forces, assigned to military police at a base in Helsinki. His dad, when 19, served in 1993 as an air force mechanic. Whether in the military or in a civilian capacity, all Finnish men must serve while women can volunteer.
A year ago, the NATO YouTube channel posted a video titled, “Finnish conscripts and the meaning of sisu,” which explains how Finland abandoned military neutrality and joined NATO after Russia invaded Ukraine.
In the video, Veera Remes, a young woman in the Finnish army’s Jaeger Brigade, is shown during exercises in a snow-covered forest. Wearing a camo outfit with a white base and earth-toned patterns to blend into the winter setting, she says she went a week “with no sleep, with basically no food.”
She describes the role of sisu in her training, “You have to come here and be outside and be in the point of breaking, when you get so angry that you have no other choice than keeping going on.”
Juuso tries to define his version of sisu: “Discipline and perseverance. The hard times during my service have taught me a lot. I have grown a lot mentally … I don’t regret coming here one bit. I want to be more connected to Finland. I believe Finland is worth fighting for.”
Grit and happiness
The Luotos built a wood-fired sauna by a creek on their property in Fall City. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)
In its Oct. 30, 2025, issue, The Economist ran an opinion piece by a writer who goes by Charlemagne, titled, “The Finnish lifestyle philosophy that could save Europe. Sisu, or grit in the face of adversity, is just what the continent needs.” It concluded that for Europeans, “cultivating sisu will mean celebrating the tale of how they became prosperous and secure. If they want to stay that way, they have much to do.”
It could very well have been addressed to Americans.
Why not learn from the Finns? (Although it’s doubtful a universal draft would play here.)
Finland consistently ranks at the top of the World Happiness Report published by the University of Oxford. Meanwhile, depression remains historically high in the U.S., affecting 18% of the adult population, according to a 2025 Gallup survey.
In Finland, sisu starts at an early age. Charlemagne says, “At Jatkasaari primary and middle school in Helsinki on a sunny autumn morning, not a parent is in sight. Children of all ages walk or cycle to school alone.”
When the Luoto family arrived in Washington in 2016, they first lived in Carnation, sending Juuso and his twin sister, Elise, and older sister, Julia, now 22, to middle school there.
“The middle school was a mile away. The children biked there,” says their mother, Sonja Luoto. “After two or three months, an older lady in the neighborhood came up and said, ‘You shouldn’t let your young kids go to school alone. This is Carnation. You never know what’s out there.’”
Her kids switched to taking a school bus that stopped near their home. “But they still biked if the weather was good. It was faster than the bus, anyway!” Sonja says, noting there were only a few bicycles on the bike racks at the Carnation school. “In Finland, there would be 100.”
Kids are expected to get themselves to school, she says. “Both parents are usually at work at 7 a.m. It’s very normal,” says Sonja.
Author Uyai Dennis of The Plenary, a San Francisco-based civic arts and science nonprofit, summarized in a 2025 column why kids in Finland walk to school without fear: “A society that actually trusts people. Roads that prioritize people. Raising little warriors, not worriers … Finnish children are raised with independence embedded in their DNA.”
On the happiness factor, the Finns have another custom that goes hand-in-hand with sisu: sauna culture. In Finland, there are 3.3 million saunas in a country of 5.5 million inhabitants, according to a 2020 report from UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage.
“Sauna culture, which can take place in homes or public places, involves much more than simply washing oneself. In a sauna, people cleanse their bodies and minds and embrace a sense of inner peace,” said the report.
The Luotos built a sauna at their first home in Carnation, and then, in Fall City, father and son spent six months on weekends and holidays building an outhouse for a wood-fired sauna. It’s the kind that you toss water onto heated rocks. In Finnish mythology, the steam is spiritual.
“It’s something you can’t live without,” Sonja says about their sauna. “It’s always been the place where you can relax after a really long day. That’s where you get your strength back. You come back reenergized.” Another essential ingredient in sisu.
Learning not to worry
Well, maybe your kids don’t walk to school alone. But there are other ways to teach them not to be worriers.
In 2019, Washington became the first state to license outdoor, nature-based preschools; there are now 20 of them, according to a Feb. 25, 2025, Seattle Times story.
“(Children) learn about risk-taking, and they learn about thinking about the consequences of their actions,” Steve Barnett, an expert from the National Institute for Early Education at Rutgers University, said then.
In Redmond, the Sisu Outdoor School is run, of course, by a 2016 arrival from Finland, Sanna Luoma. It has 65 enrolled children, ranging from ages 3 to 11.
On a recent December day, a rainy, cold day like most that month, 14 children ages 3-5 were trekking along the paths on 12 acres of woodland that Luoma rents from a family who owns the land.
They were bundled up in waterproof rain jackets, hoodies, and rain boots, each carrying a small backpack with their lunch. They went up a trail and over a small bridge across a narrow stream, Luoma at the front, a staffer at the back. Luoma says the kids hike for about 20 minutes every day.
“I like to go in the rain,” Ethan Taylor, of Redmond, who’s all of 3½, tells me.
His mom, Kelli Taylor, says she and her husband enjoy hiking and mountaineering, and that interest has passed to their son. “He loves being outside, loves being active.” But she says she had never heard of the term sisu until enrolling her son in the school.
Taylor says the teachers there “do a good job at the beginning of the year for the kids to learn boundaries in the woods.” Ethan has had “a few scrapes and bruises from climbing trees, but he does that at home, too.”
Luoma, 50, was a teacher when she lived in Finland. The family came here because her husband, Lari Luoma, had a job offer in tech security.
She started work at the school in 2023, when it was called Tiny Treks NW. With the owner retiring, she bought it last summer and changed the name because the old name was tied to a franchise. Sisu seemed appropriate.
“It’s my quiet superpower. It’s a piece of my homeland I can bring anywhere with me,” says Luoma.
These days, many Finnish immigrants to this area work in tech. But in the early 1900s, Finns arriving in this country worked in forestry, construction, boatbuilding, and farming. Finn Hill in Kirkland is named after Finnish farmers who settled there.
I made another call to Helsinki, this time to E. Elisabet Lahti, who, in 2019, published a paper on sisu as part of her Ph.D. in applied psychology. She’s gone on to publish two books on the power of sisu.
The sisu concept of perseverance and resilience is “my quiet superpower,” says Sanna Luoma, owner of Sisu Outdoor School for children. “It’s a piece of my homeland I can bring anywhere with me.” (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times)
“The closest translation for sisu is that it refers to internal organs, literally, guts,” she says. Lahti says that, “if facing adversity, it’s latent power.“
It can be as simple as telling yourself, she says, “Wow, I have a pretty good record in overcoming hard moments in my life.”
She tells of Veikka Gustafsson, who in 1993 became the first Finn to climb Mount Everest. By 2009, he had climbed his 14th 8,000-meter peak without supplementary oxygen.
Gustafsson climbed a peak in Antarctica and named it Mount Sisu. He named his son Sisu.
Lahti says that although Finland is the home of sisu, it’s also found in other cultures. There is “rasmia” in Spanish; “gaman” in Japanese; “l’ chatchila ariber” in Yiddish.
Look around your own family, and you’ll find examples: The immigrants who worked long hours under grueling conditions to build their savings. The single parent who juggled a job while raising a family.
She does warn about having too much sisu. “It creates an attitude of mercilessness, as an individual imposes their own high standards on others.” Think Elon Musk. Or the high-octane hero in the “Sisu” movies.
Finding connection
On the evening of Dec. 6, I go to the Finnish Independence Day Dinner & Dance at the National Nordic Museum in Ballard, sponsored by the Seattle chapter of the Finlandia Foundation. About 200 people attend the sold-out event.
Finns make up a small percentage of our population. Just 0.2% of the United States population reports Finnish ancestry, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Washington State, it’s 0.6%.
One of the organizers is Outi Makiniemi, a senior business planner at Microsoft in North Bend. Her husband, Timo Makiniemi, has retired from Microsoft. Like the Luoto family, they came here in 2016, when the company acquired Nokia.
She might be a techie, but at age 53, Outi can remember her late grandmother talking about the war with the Soviets. At one point, she had to relocate from land lost to them.
“I remember my grandma many times repeating the same story, that when peace was negotiated, the next morning they had to be on the train, taking only what they could carry. Everything else they left behind,” remembers Outi.
The grandmother married a Finnish soldier, and eventually, through a housing program, they got a tiny house.
“They built a huge garden, grew vegetables, apples. They had bees to make extra money from honey,” says Outi. A lot of sisu, she says.
I ask about the similarities to Ukraine.
“The suffering is the same way, I think,” she says. The Ukrainians, like the Finns in their wars with the Russians, have to “swallow those feelings and keep going.”
At the beginning of their war with the Russians, the Ukrainians adopted the same tactic the Finns used eight decades earlier to defend their country against advancing Soviet tanks. They made Molotov cocktails, the improvised incendiary devices filled with flammable liquid and topped with a wick.
They were named after Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who claimed in 1939 that Russian war planes weren’t bombing Helsinki, but dropping food packages.
At the dinner, I strike up conversations with other Finns. A woman shows me a picture of her toddler grandson. He’s wearing a diaper emblazoned with “SISU” on the back. I watch the Finns immediately take to the dance floor when a band for the event opens with “Dancing Queen,” the ABBA hit from their neighboring country, Sweden.
One conversation in particular stands out: Gunnar Damstrom, 82, is a retired chemical engineer, who now lives in Helsinki. He spent 43 years in Seattle, but during the pandemic, he and his wife went back to Finland.
He is visiting his two sons, who live in Bellevue, and tells me about visiting American friends.
“You can see the stress reflected in the discussion at the dinner table, in every household,” he says. “There are some elderly family members who are fiercely opposite to the liberal, younger generation.”
If children are present, listening, says Damstrom, “They’re definitely disturbed by the polarization they see in the family.”
Damstrom believes the U.S., will come through this difficult period in our history. “Americans have a lot of sisu,” he says. “They will find common ground. I hope that will happen.”
I’ve written enough stories about people who’ve gone through hardships and come out the other end. They were from all backgrounds and ages, but they had this in common: They believed, and they endured.
I asked Elisabet Lahti for three sisu tips she had for us Americans. She responds:
“1. Sisu is not something we need to find or develop, but rather, to reconnect with. It’s universal and innate to every person.
2. Inner strength is about collective connection: the deepening of sisu is about finding connection with each other to access true strength.
3. When we heal our body, we heal our decisions: sisu is about embodied strength and is built through taking care of our well-being. This means to sleep, eat and move well.”
There you are. Go for it.
Courtesy: Seattle Times
Bd-pratidin English/Lutful Hoque
