Everything becomes natural, eventually

It was one of those perfect, long July days I think about now, in the usual November of southwest Finland: snowy promises of the upcoming winter melting into wet, muddy slush, then freezing into bumpy ice.

The 6-year-old and I drove toward the beach, windows wide open because who wants air conditioning when you can let the scent of drying hay fill the cabin.

I have a favourite spot on the quiet fringe of Finland’s archipelago coast. It has everything you’d need for a lazy day: a circular sand beach in the arms of pines and black alders, a small kiosk where you can buy ice-cream and crisps and orange lemonade, a tiny hut to change your clothes, a sauna, a wooden pier that swings in waves.

Still, very few people go there—it’s on an island, and you have to drive there along a bumpy road that twists past small farms, country cottages, and pine hills that poke their heads above the wheat fields. It’s far away from the world, and that’s exactly why we go there, my son and me.

We’ve tried many beaches, but the 6-year-old says they’re too noisy, and I say there are too many families covering their upbringing in head-to-toe swimsuits where no sun or wind or sand can touch their skin, and with so many arm floaties they would keep a small ferry afloat.

The 6-year-old ran straight into engineering a canal system at the edge of the water, and I lay down on soft sand. The Baltic Sea can’t pride itself on bright waters, but we’ve lived on its coast for five years, and I’ve become fond of its softly salted estuary, flat rocks, time-worn fishing huts, and patchwork quilt made of green islands and rocky islets.

The waves kept slapping the shore, a rather lazy-looking gull circled above the sea, and I stared at them and thought about the client case waiting on my desk—we’d had a long talk before the beach trip, planning the autumn and talking about the new direction she was gravitating towards and all the things that would need redesigning and reshaping on her website and communication.

How strange it is that I’ve spent eight years doing work the world calls marketing. I’ve never called myself a marketer, yet here I am, building websites and brands and all the things the industry likes to dress up as strategies and assets. I can talk fluently about ROIs and frameworks the same way I can talk about solid cubic metres and undergrowth in forestry, or hex codes and paddings in design. Useful terms, all of them, but none was the thing itself.

On that beach, expressions were everywhere. In the reeds shivering in the wind, in the clouds drifting past with no urgency, and in me, lying there calm and careless in the sun like a warm stone. Everything expressed because that’s what nature does. That’s what you do until someone tells you to optimise.

You become natural when you stop performing and start expressing.

And marketing, at its simplest, is expression with a direction. A message with a place to go. You make something, and you let people know it exists.

In Finnish, the word for express is ilmaista. It comes from ilma—air. I love that. It makes expression feel like something elemental: fluid and independent. It can arrive as the glory of the first snow in November or as a salty breeze on a hot July afternoon. It doesn’t need permission or performance. It just moves.

When I think about marketing this way—as expression, as air—it stops being a spectacle. It’s just air in motion. It has a direction, but it stays natural in its movements.

Will it guarantee you readers, clients, applause? Of course not. It won’t magically spare you the work you have to do, which is often a lot of work, and work that can swallow the time for the actual work you’re doing.

But it will end the internal wrestling match with the part of your work called marketing. You’ll do it with the tools, words, and platforms you choose—and there are many to choose from. You decide the tone, you decide the pace. You use your energy for expression instead of resistance, and stop acting like it’s anything more than a basic human gesture: letting people know what you’ve made.

The relief doesn’t come from finding your niche or optimising your sales page to respond to every known psychological trigger. It comes when you drop the battle and start expressing what’s already there.

Lying there in the sun, I suppose I’ve always liked building bridges between dreams and reality, and maybe I’ve been in the forest air too long, but I think we can express the same way seagulls and reeds and black alders do whatever it is they do in the wind, without questioning whether our song is worth singing.

I swiped the sand from my legs. The wind picked up across the bay, turning the surface of the sea into small, glittering arrows. The 6-year-old dropped his shovel and waded into the waves. “I am a seal,” he laughed, pressing his legs together and trying to stay afloat. I squinted toward the sun, and jumped from the pier.