Tove Jansson

A World Where Our Differences Belong

At ByBa, we have recently been talking about wonderful people such as Jim Henson and María Elena Walsh. There are others who, like them, crossed the borders of their own countries to show us a kinder, richer and far more creative world, one built around something profound: a world we can belong to without leaving our differences behind.

Today we meet Tove Jansson, the Finnish artist and writer who created the Moomins.

Born in Helsinki in 1914 into a family of artists, Jansson was a painter, illustrator, writer and comic-strip artist. The first Moomin book appeared in 1945, at the end of a period deeply marked by war, although that universe had begun taking shape during the preceding years, while Europe was going through one of its darkest periods.

Perhaps that is why, from their earliest adventures, the Moomins made room for danger, uncertainty, displacement and the search for shelter, but also for friendship, nature, curiosity and the possibility of building a home even when the outside world feels threatening.

Creating a World Without Erasing Differences

The Moomins are not a perfect, homogeneous family.

Around them are creatures with very different temperaments, desires, rhythms and ways of relating to others. Some need company; others seek long periods of solitude. Some long for adventure while others need the reassurance of knowing when they will return home. There are impulsive, reserved, restless, melancholic, independent and deeply family-oriented characters.

Jansson does not try to make them all become alike.

That matters.

Many stories create harmony by having their characters eventually learn to behave in roughly the same way. The Moomin universe often proposes something more interesting: living together does not require erasing the singularities that sometimes make living together difficult.

From the perspective of Creative Family, this leaves us with a question worth carrying with us: how much room do we make for those who live, feel or imagine differently?

Your own family probably contains many different rhythms. Someone who needs to tell you immediately what has happened and someone who finds the words later. Someone who enjoys adventure and someone who needs to know when you are going home. Someone who enters a group easily and someone who needs to observe from a distance before joining in.

From our adult perspective, we sometimes try to bring those differences closer to a single idea of how things ought to be.

Perhaps we can pause and wonder what we might discover if, instead of immediately correcting those differences, we paid a little more attention to what they are telling us.

An Imagination Also Born from the Need for Shelter

There is another aspect of Tove Jansson that is particularly interesting when we think about creativity.

The Moomins were not born during an especially bright period.

Jansson began developing their world while living through the years of the Second World War. Fantasy offered her a different space in the face of the anxiety and destruction around her.

This does not mean she imagined a universe in which nothing bad could happen. Floods, comets, threats, separation, loneliness and fear all appear in her stories.

What is distinctive is what she does with them.

Imagination does not remove uncertainty: it builds places within it where life remains possible.

Perhaps this is one reason Moominvalley feels comforting without becoming naïve. It is a home safe enough to return to, yet open enough for its inhabitants to leave, explore, change and come back somewhat different.

For a Creative Family, that combination of shelter and freedom has a great deal to say.

Making Room Is Also a Form of Creativity

We often think about creativity as producing something that did not exist before: an idea, a drawing, a song or an object.

But we can also understand it as the ability to build spaces in which more possibilities can exist.

That is precisely what Jansson did with her characters.

She did not simply create original creatures. She designed a universe capable of containing them.

The distinction may seem subtle, but it becomes powerful when transferred to a family, classroom or community.

It is not enough to say that we value differences if everyone is still expected to learn, express themselves, play, speak or relate to others in exactly the same way.

Sometimes encouraging childhood creativity is less about adding stimulation and more about making room.

Allowing someone longer to think.

Accepting that another child needs to move.

Listening to an explanation that does not follow the expected route.

Allowing a kind of play we would never have invented ourselves.

Asking before correcting.

A Small Universe That Travelled the World

Tove Jansson's work eventually travelled far beyond Finland.

Her books were translated, adapted and read in many countries, and in 1954 the Moomins began appearing as a comic strip in London's Evening News. The series reached an enormous international readership and transformed creatures born within a small personal universe into characters recognised far beyond the culture in which they first appeared.

But perhaps the true scale of that journey is not simply a question of how many countries they reached.

It lies in the fact that very different readers could enter Moominvalley and find someone there with whom they could identify.

Jansson created a singular world that, paradoxically, proved hospitable to countless singularities.

A Question for Our Own Family

Today we can return to those stories with a question of our own:

how do we help every member of our family feel that they belong without asking them to stop being who they are?

Giving ourselves time to listen to them can enlarge our world and, with it, theirs.

We may discover interests we had not noticed, different ways of feeling, rhythms we had mistaken for resistance, or forms of imagination that remained hidden simply because they did not fit our expectations.

Tove Jansson left us a universe we can return to whenever we want to keep imagining how living together might work.

And every family has a small opportunity to continue that task.

At ByBa, we invite you to make room, listen and allow differences to become part of your shared story.

Clody, Lady Play @ ByBa