Perambulations

Our journeys through life are strange ones.  Decisions we take or events that occur around us often have only a small effect on what happens to us.  We might not notice the subtle changes in our lives or only realize their significance later when looking back from a very different place.  Daily developments are often like the slow heating of water that the frog – to his eventual detriment – does not perceive.

It was six years ago to the day that Flucha and I rode bicycles along a river in the southwest of Germany whose name I had never heard of before setting out.  Flucha was on the heavy and unambitious bicycle she had bought used to get her around town.  I had rented something that revived my joy of bike touring.  If I had had a similar set of wheels years earlier, my tours down to Hungary and to the end of Brittany would have been much less painful.

I don’t remember whose idea our bike trip was nor how it came about.  Flucha and I had never done such a thing together.  I was doubtful until halfway through the first day whether she’d collapse by the side of the road because the bike had worn her out.  In the end, she arrived at our goal for the day, a forlorn town near another river that we’d ride along the next day back to the railway station where we’d started, in almost the same shape as me: sweaty, covered in dust and exhausted but happy about the achievement.  We had an unexpectedly delicious dinner that we paid for by bank transfer a couple of days later because we had no cash and they didn’t accept our cards, and made a baby.

At that moment, it wasn’t clear that anything was happening or that anything had changed, but everything was different afterwards.  Before the baby was born, I had quit my comfortable but dead-end academic job in London and moved to Switzerland to work for a company whose prospects I couldn’t judge well.  Flucha hung out at her temporary post in Germany a bit longer.  She made the move to Switzerland a year and a half later, a little girl in tow.  Another year and a bit later, the boy was born.  He knows nothing of our ambulatory past yet.  Switzerland is his home.

Late this afternoon, we were sitting on the terrace of one of the cafés in town.  The sun was blocked by low clouds.  It was still pleasant but summer is definitely over.  A hill half a mile ahead blocked my view of the distance.  A similar hill rose to my right.  It was easy to see Baden as a protective bubble, the world far removed, beyond the hills, with little to no impact on the goings-on in town.

This feeling can be hard to shake off.  Corona is still raging around the world, coming back to Europe with a vengeance after ravaging the Americas, but our little lives continue undisturbed.  It’s hard to see the connection.  We go to work every morning.  Our children are intimately familiar with the term coronavirus and the small changes the virus has made to their habits – the more frequent washing of hands and the sneezing into armpits – but blissfully unaware of any peril.  They spend their days in childcare and kindergarten as always.  At night, we all return home to the center of our happiness.  It’s an absurd situation, if one stops to think about it.

In her second year of kindergarten, the girl has started extracurricular activities to an extent that may seem a bit excessive.  She takes a rhythm class on Mondays, does an hour of entropic physical exercise on Thursdays and attends an atelier on Fridays, a course that’s revealed to us an impressive range of her artistic talents.  She knows half of the town and is nobody’s fool.  Earlier today, we dropped her off at a bus stop for a teaser afternoon with the Scouts.  She returned two hours later, exhausted, happy and eager for more.

I know that we live privileged lives and that we’re extremely lucky.  I get happy whenever I sit down, zoom out and think about this.  We’ve been blessed in almost everything that has happened to us over the last few years.  I’m ready to extend this statement to my early years.  Not that there was a sense of destiny or that one step followed the previous one with convincing logic.  More often, things happened by change, out of a burst of initial enthusiasm that somehow took hold and was reinterpreted as a rational decision, or for convenience.  But together, all these little steps shaped my life, and I’m extremely happy with where I am.