One thing that I appreciate about the French language is how many idiosyncratic expressions it has, expressions that just scratch a weird itch I never knew I had. Listening to my favorite French radio show, I learned one such expression many years ago: « salle des pas perdus », literally “hall of the lost steps”. It describes those liminal spaces that we encounter in the form of large open vestibules such as train station halls, open to the ever coming-and-going public.
I have lived here in Zürich for the past 4.5 years and the salle des pas perdus of the main train station here has been the doorway to many memorable experiences: countless hiking and camping trips in the mountains, plenty of dancing festivals, visits at my grandma’s, meditation retreats, bicycle trips, conference journeys, trips to and with friends, and much more. Yet, throughout the dozens and dozens of times I sat on a train pulling into Zürich, it never once felt like I was coming back home, and so it feels right that today is the first time I am leaving without a return ticket. Earlier, I handed over the keys to my flat - it is a charming little apartment in a very old building with a great location, 5 minutes from the Kunsthaus where I took in Monet’s water lilies more than once, and just a short walk to the old town and the Zürich lake. Sometimes, from my window, I could even watch our resident squirrel jump between the trees in the garden. Yet, I handed over the keys without hesitation; I was so done with this city that there was no doubt in my mind about my decision. Now, at the train station, there is a lot of hustle and bustle since it is a surprisingly warm Saturday afternoon for February and peak skiing season. With my backpack and suitcase in tow, I weave my way through the crowd and approach platform 16 where my white double-decker intercity train is already standing ready for boarding. I take a deep breath and get in.
Earlier, I met with a friend for a last lunch at my favorite third place in the city, the vegetarian restaurant Tibits, next to the opera house at the lake. As I was leaving the restaurant and making my way home, my chest suddenly tightened, and even hours later, my breaths now still have the same heaviness to them. But as I enter the train, I can feel the quality of that tension quickly change. I push open the door to the lower level of the seating area and look for a seat. I notice how the tension around my larynx that I didn’t even notice was building intensifies. I am quite grateful in this moment that it’s the middle of the afternoon because it means that my train compartment is almost completely empty. No need to be discreet about what I know is going to happen in a moment, I realize with relief. I stow away my suitcase and big hiking backpack behind my seat as I try to suppress the tears that are welling up for another moment, just long enough to sit down.
Over the years I have spent in this city, I have come to know many flavors of sadness. There was the slight fog that clouded my eyes when I was moved by a particularly poignant scene in a theater piece. There was the lump in my stomach that I felt at times when I left my therapist’s office, feeling stuck with a deck of cards for a game I hadn’t even chosen to play. There were the sharp pangs of loneliness I felt during the isolation of Covid, most of which I spent in cities where I knew no one. There was the strange numbness I felt at times when the pain became too much. There were the times when I got meaningful letters or gifts from friends that stirred me to tears. There were the evenings where I was so wrung out by life that I cried into my pillow and felt better afterwards. There was the grey and dull, familiar gloom of depression. There was the particular heaviness I felt at my arrival in Zürich when I still felt the ripples of my three-week solo-hike through Norway that had itself been an emotional roller-coaster. There were layers of grief that I was just beginning to unravel.
Throughout all of that, it has of course often happened to me that I felt better after I journaled, had a good cry, or talked to a friend. Yet, as I look out the train window past my faint reflection, this particular shade of sadness feels more intense. It feels very alive, with a colorful texture I am not used to: I feel my sense of self expand as I let the mixture of grief and relief flow through me. All the times I struggled and put myself back together bubble up and I can now viscerally appreciate just how hard I had tried to keep it all together in a myriad of ways for the past years living here. Now, as I am leaving, I feel as though I don’t need to keep it together anymore. I can finally let go.
I cry as my train rolls out of the train station. I cry through the familiar journey through the city, through the tunnel towards the northern outskirts, past the airport and Winterthur, and as we pass the Rhine Falls and the many small towns and villages along the way. I only stop sobbing as my train rolls into its first stop all the way at the German border.
A few weeks later, my Flixbus is making its way into Amsterdam during the blue hour. Having spent so much time in Zürich which, in many ways, feels quite small, I am struck by the sense of spaciousness the large and pristine window fronts create. I feel a sense of openness in the wide streets, the canals, the comfy restaurant lightings, … that I didn’t know I missed. As I check in at my hotel, even it has this sense of spaciousness. It is by no means an expensive hotel, outside the city center to save money, but it is the very first time that I experience what a bathroom floor heating feels like. After reassuring myself with some online research that floor heatings are not worse energywise than regular heating (and may even be preferable!), I indulge in this creature comfort, spreading out on the bathroom floor for a moment.
My hotel is in a funny little corner with a lot of jazz musician-themed street names. Count Basie Straat, John Coltrane Straat, Chet Baker Straat, … It made me realize that I hadn’t listened to Bill Evans in quite a while and I had forgotten how much joy I derive from his music. As I get up from the bathroom floor, I walk to my desk, do my daily meditation, open my laptop, put on Jazz Jane’s rendition of Bill Evans, and punch in for work.
The Secret Annex
I grew up basically not traveling at all since my family never had money for this privilege, and so traveling is actually not something that comes naturally to me at all. As a student traveling to conferences, I would get sick after basically every conference because my immune system crashed from all the stress. Even though I have since traveled a fair deal in my life and lived in various countries, traveling sometimes still stresses me out. To feel less overwhelmed at the prospect of going to a new city, I like to connect my travels with things that I already carry within me since it gives me a different, slightly familiar way to relate to a place. This can be connecting travels with a film I have watched such as Wild (2014) , a band I have already known such as Lawrence, or in this case, a book I had read: Anne Frank’s diary.
Anne Frank’s recollections of her time in Amsterdam, starting shortly before her family had to go into hiding in the very heart of Amsterdam, had been on my reading list for a while and 2024 was finally the year I got around to reading her diary. It was not at all what I expected. While her diary reflects some of the highs and lows of the war, a lot of it is also her writing about her everyday life in their hiding place, as well as her personal thoughts and aspirations. I have to admit that Anne Frank’s diary inspired me more than I would have expected. It is not so much what she writes about her life in the secret annex building, but rather how this 13-year-old girl writes about her inner life. When I read the book, I could really feel her ardent feminism, her keen sense for justice, her aspirations, her ambitions, and her deeply felt indignation, pain, and loneliness.
The sun is shining, the sky is deep blue, there’s a magnificent breeze, and I’m longing — really longing — for everything: conversation, freedom, friends, being alone. I long… to cry! […] I think spring is inside me. I feel spring awakening, I feel it in my entire body and soul. I have to force myself to act normally. I’m in a state of utter confusion, don’t know what to read, what to write, what to do. I only know that I’m longing for something… — Anne Frank
And thus, her diary has brought me to Amsterdam. A few days after my arrival, it is now Friday evening and I have finally made it to the house that had served as their hiding spot and has long since become a museum. I could go into more detail about what I saw in the Anne Frank house: the little rooms, stepping through the threshold of their hiding space behind a cupboard, or the touching animation at the very end of the museum, where I spent way more time than I anticipated, drawn in by the shifting images. I shall not go into it here, for there are better sources to read about it, and nothing can replace seeing the museum first-hand. For me, one of the most interesting questions during such an experience always is: what stays with me? How do I let it change me? What does it do with me as a person when I am confronted with such resilience and injustice?
I don’t just want to say “wow, it is terrible that this happened!” and then simply move on with my life. I want to take a moment to give things the time and space to resonate with me in a more lasting way, in a way that makes a difference. I feel like staring plainly in the face of injustice and, frankly, evil, it makes me want to change the status quo. Listening to the accounts of people who, faced with the injustice around them, decided not to look away but to risk everything to help save the life of another person, listening to such accounts makes me wonder: maybe I can do more about my own problems and the problems in the world, more than I have been doing? Maybe I can become more resourceful, do things that are more uncomfortable, be more ambitious, dream bigger? And as a very basis for that, be kinder and better to myself, because I’m part of this world and without self-compassion I’m not going to go very far?
My friends sometimes make fun of me because people who know me often consider me to already be quite an ambitious person. In our achievement-oriented society, ambition is a word that has acquired a bitter taste, where not being ambitious can sometimes be regarded as a bad or even shameful thing, and I think that is deplorable. And at the same time, it is to ambition that we owe many authentic and raw works of art, breakthroughs in science, spiritual depth as it can be found in Buddhist monks, or great acts of kindness such as Anne Frank experienced them. I like to believe that there is a pure form of ambition that is beyond seeking status, a form of ambition that is calm and gentle and allows for the time that things require without rushing. An ambition that is gentle and kind, assertive but not clinging, aspiring to what things can be without devaluing what is through comparison. A way to be ambitious without losing touch with ourselves, but rather deepening that fil avec nous-même. A form of ambition that is, first and foremost, about being more alive. I’m not really sure these are quite the right words to express what I feel but I think about this often, and so I do now, still sitting here watching the shifting images of the projection at the end of the museum where a drawing of a fish swims in a peaceful pond. What would it look like if I was a little more ambitious in that way?
I don’t know it yet at the time, but the experience would guide some of my actions later that year. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves - for now, I am still in Amsterdam, where the next stop is the local Balboa festival.
I had planned my trip to Amsterdam without knowing there was even going to be a festival here, but of course once I knew that it had a Balboa beginner track and was also going to be an ELEF festival (Everyone Leads, Everyone Follows), I couldn’t resist signing up. While it is to be expected at this point that I’m going to see a familiar face when I go to a festival in Europe, I am still surprised as I walk into the class: there stands another dancer from Zürich who is part of an online book club of Zürich-based dancers that we are currently doing together on a book on racism in Switzerland. Incidentally, the first meeting of that book club is going to be that very evening.
What I Don’t Tell You
I never felt at home in Zürich. Some might say that’s natural; I only lived there a few years after all. But the fact that I never felt even a bit at home there, nor anywhere else I have lived in my life, sometimes gives me pause. However, I don’t talk about this since I have made the experience that, more often than not, people find it hard to relate to and hold space for my experience and the feelings that are associated with it. Maybe this explains why the title of the book, Was ich dir nicht sage (What I don’t tell you), spoke to me. Written by Swiss activist & journalist Anja Nunyola Glover, it is a curious book about her experience growing up and living in Switzerland as a black person.
I’m constantly filled with a longing for home that no place could soothe. But when I write, it eases. — Anja Nunyola Glover
This is not a book that provides you a step-by-step guide on what to do about racism. Here and there, if they are willing to listen, the open-minded reader can learn a lot, but the book’s goal is not to offer a sense of resolution. At its core, Anja tries to nudge a reflection by drawing a portrait of her personal experience with racism which has finally manifested as debilitating back pain. A portrait that, necessarily, touches on a wide array of her experiences. How has the constant othering she experienced growing up outside of the majority culture influenced what “home” means to her? Why has she never felt like she just unconditionally belonged? How have the common pressures such as “Work Harder, Be Smarter” that immigrant children experience shaped her relationship with work and self-esteem, with being enough? Why did she, like many Black folks, develop a double consciousness where she always also sees herself through the eyes of the white experience? Why did she learn, already early on, that there was no place for her to express her anger about racism, lest she be stamped an “angry black woman”, condemned to always face racism with a smile? Why does she have a fundamentally different relationship with the police than her white friends?
Throughout the book, she describes a lot of personal struggles such as her relationship with her hair and the absence of anyone who could teach her how to care for it, the weight of representing all Black people in predominantly white spaces, the exhaustion of constant code-switching. She writes about racial trauma, which researcher Kenneth V. Hardy describes as the consequence of constant exposure to pervasive, subtle and not-so-subtle forms of racism, external and internalized. Her body exists in a state of permanent alertness, in chronic stress causing her to frequently dissociate, and the anger of having to manage this alone only makes it worse. She touches on the irony of living in a culture that prides itself on chocolate being one of “the most Swiss things ever” while being disconnected from the complex history and reality of chocolate production. She explores how internalized racism operates, how even her own silence about racist incidents at school was itself an expression of internalized racism.
I had honestly rarely thought about racism before, and if you would have asked me, I would have said I was lucky to grow up in a more progressive part of Germany and had little note-worthy personal experience with racism. But reading this book, I started thinking about a lot of things in my life. I thought about being the only Black kid at my school of 1000+ students. How I have never told even a single person about the racial slurs I experienced at school. I thought about my internalized racism about hair in black people including myself. I thought about being randomly stopped and controlled by police on my way home. I thought about being a really skilled mathematician but feeling thoroughly out-of-place in the academic environments I was in. I thought about feeling as though I had no culture to call my own. About being aware of being perceived differently. I thought about how I try to make extra sure to make a good impression so that people of color who come after me have it easier. I thought about my own sense of being without a home. I realized I am not alone with my experiences, that they are collectively shared and collectively unspoken experiences. I started listening to the podcast Kiffe ta race and began to notice the shame around growing up as an immigrant kid in a poor dysfunctional family. How much I wanted to prove people wrong and to prove myself.
As the book club goes on, all of these things are swirling around my head and it’s honestly a bit overwhelming. We end the book club talking about one of the concerns why we are reading the book as a group of lindy hoppers: cultural appropriation and the scarcity of BIPOC people in Lindy. What responsibility do we have to do something about them, and what are practical things we can do?
After the online book club meeting that Saturday evening, right before the next Balboa party, the feelings evoked within me can best be described by a quote that is often misattributed to Saint Exupéry. The French original goes as follows:
Celui-là tissera des toiles, l’autre dans la forêt par l’éclair de sa hache couchera l’arbre. L’autre, encore, forgera des clous, et il en sera quelque part qui observeront les étoiles afin d’apprendre à gouverner. Et tous cependant ne seront qu’un. Créer le navire ce n’est point tisser les toiles, forger les clous, lire les astres, mais bien donner le goût de la mer qui est un, et à la lumière duquel il n’est plus rien qui soit contradictoire mais communauté dans l’amour. (Citadelle, 1948)
But for those who do not speak French, here is the shortened English version that is typically (mis)attributed to him.
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.
What can I say? A deep longing has been stirred within me, something I didn’t know was there. A deep sadness has been awakened and it feels good. It’s a feeling that, once felt, cannot be unfelt, and I know it is going to stay with me. I don’t think there is any place I will ever be able to call home outside of myself. And that’s okay. If only it wasn’t so hard at times to feel at home in myself.
Blue in Green
Until we become sensitized to the small child’s suffering, this wielding of power by adults will continue to be regarded as a normal aspect of the human condition, for hardly anyone pays attention to it or takes it seriously. Because the victims are ‘only children’, their distress is trivialized. Someone who slaps or hits another adult or knowingly insults her is aware of hurting her. Even if he doesn’t know why he is doing this, he has some sense of what he is doing. But how often were our parents, and we ourselves toward our own children, unconscious of how painfully, deeply, and abidingly they and we injured a child’s tender, budding self? […] I sometimes ask myself whether it will ever be possible for us to grasp the extent of the loneliness and desertion to which we were exposed as children. — Alice Miller, The Drama of Being A Child
If you were to ask me, what my favorite philosophical current is, it’s very easy for me to answer: I really enjoy Buddhism as a philosophy because I think it has a lot of interesting concepts for navigating life and our minds, of which I particularly like the more phenomenological ones, concepts like how we don’t see reality as it is, or how a big part of the root of suffering is not our feelings but the way we relate to them, be it aversions or clinging. I didn’t expect to be thinking about this today but here I am in my hotel room, faced with a boat load of aversion I didn’t expect, trying to cling to a part of my self-concept that I feel slipping away.
One of the things I have learned about my mind is that healing comes in many shapes & forms: a hug, a journal entry, a good chat. Sometimes, just sitting still. One of these many forms is the controlled & deliberately therapeutic use of psychedelics, as it is being pioneered in various clinical studies. Being in Amsterdam, a city where the access to psilocybin in the form of magic truffles is legal, my curiosity was piqued. I have honestly had a rather negative attitude towards “drugs” for most of my life because they felt like escapism, like chasing something “unreal”. However, while I still engage in them extremely rarely, I have since come around in a lot of ways and now acknowledge this as being a rather complex and nuanced topic. And so it is that I got up this morning, meditated, and prepped for my “trip” by journaling & setting intentions for what topics to explore.
When I ate the truffles about 20 min ago, I imagined myself sitting there and writing a lot of stuff into my diary as emotions held in my body became unlocked to flow more freely, and my neuroplasticity was supposedly meant to increase. Instead, my mind went “lol, fuck that” and I am now mildly alarmed at a sensation that feels like my grasp of my mind slowly drifting away from me, causing a growing ball of concern to form in my stomach. I manage to write about a third of a page in my journal before I realize this is not going anywhere; I increasingly feel like I am barely staying afloat and like a current is pulling me what feels like underwater. I understand now why people say you are not meant to do this alone - I have never had a panic attack but I imagine it would feel a bit like this. I try to meditate but my focus keeps slipping away again and again. I swiftly get up to unlock my hotel room door, just in case I trip or something and need medical attention.
I am pacing through my room, a bit afraid as I am clinging to a part of my self-concept that feels really hard to let go of but seems to be determined on slipping out of my hands, as I am reminded of some Buddhist concepts. I decide to embrace whatever happens next without grasping, without aversion, and to take it for what it is. Since my hotel room bed is quite comfy and my journal won’t do me any good, I decide to snuggle into bed and put on my headphones to fully give in to whatever is about to happen.
I think a good music choice can probably make or break such an experience. I am about to realize that I picked well and that this artist will forever have a special place in my heart: Hania Rani, who I discovered on the independent radio station KEXP just a month earlier. I invite you to put on her @arteconcert’s Piano Day performance as you keep reading. Her compositions have a quality I can only describe as spacious; they make a lot of room for whatever you bring to them.
I close my eyes. Nothing really seems to happen at first. I do not suddenly see the world in hexagons or psychedelic saturated colors. My emotions do not appear heightened. I just feel a strange, diffuse feeling of being pulled away that I am still resisting. I am still holding on.
Holding on…
I am suddenly thrown back to a childhood memory. As a kid, I was absolutely terrified by deep water. Our city’s local indoor swimming pool had three pools: a shallow one for kids, another one that got progressively deeper, and a proper deep one to do your laps or jump off the tower. I was really, really scared of that last pool as a small kid. One time, we went swimming in PE class during primary school and I had to get in that deep pool. I did so very reluctantly, but I was so scared that I just clung to the border of the pool with white knuckles, refusing the teacher’s prodding to go swim.
Emotionally, I am back at a place that feels like that situation. However, what I see is somewhat different: I see a younger version of myself, at an ocean shore, clinging to a dock as the currents are trying to pull him out to the open sea. I see all the familiar fear in him and compassion wells up within me. From behind, I swim next to this younger self. I hug him from behind and I whisper in his ear: It’s okay. I got you. You can let go. Gently, I help him loosen his tight grip on the dock, one finger at a time. A wave washes through us, gently pushing us towards the dock, and as the ocean takes a breath for the next wave, we finally begin to be carried out into the open sea. Soon, we see no land. There is only water and the two of us, and a strong feeling of surrender, afloat on the ocean.
Floating, my entire body can relax and pent-up micro-tensions I wasn’t even aware I had been holding slowly dissolve. My baseline muscular tension decreases, too, and the contrast when a thought comes up is much more noticeable. An area that I previously wasn’t really aware held tension in my body, my lower back, suddenly turns out to have more tension than other areas, especially when various thoughts come up. Does that also subconsciously happen in my everyday life? I notice that subtle emotional defenses such as mild dissociation slide into the background as I can stay awake and present to the physical manifestations of emotional pains in a different way than my meditation practice has so far allowed me to. I start to feel all the little strains placed upon me through the adversities I have faced - not new feelings, but explored from a different angle. I notice how I can shake loose of these little strains in my body & mind with more ease. I feel my sense of self expand.
A lot happens in the following hours, with three concerts by Hania Rani being the driving force, as each new piece marks an emotional transition of exploring a new topic. I expected psychedelic visuals to be more… involuntary and out there, so I am pleasantly surprised that on a high level, I am very much in control to nudge things, and that any visuals I do experience are actually an expression of my aesthetic sense and always match the music in mood. As the “rain” in the current music piece manifests visually, I begin to comprehend why a bunch of artists tried psychedelics.
Throughout everything that unfolds, I am getting better acquainted with some corners of my mind and body that have always been there and that I know I can return to in the future, having undusted them. After a while of exploration guided by Hania Rani, her music shifts into a more uncertain & transitory quality. I find myself walking through a cave shimmering in blue & green shades. Its walls are made of what seems like labradorite, my favorite mineral that owes its glowing signature effect, labradorescence, to quantum interference. As I keep walking, I approach what seems like my childhood room’s door. I have knocked on this door previously in and outside of therapy. It is a door that comes with many memories and a sad sense of estrangement that is on the mend.
I knock.
The door opens and I enter. My teenage self, older than the one from earlier, sits on the bed, legs pulled to his chin, somewhat surprised by the unexpected visit. I ask whether it’s okay if I sit next to him and he invites me to do so. We start talking, and we keep talking for a while, something we have not done nearly often enough. As we reconnect, the music has been picking up, slowly gaining more direction. Suddenly, the organ comes sweeping in, always holding its chords for a while as the piano continues its story. The energy makes the two of us go on an adventure, spending some quality time to connect more, even though the wall-clock time is quite short. I am sure you are intimately familiar with the cinematic technique of a “montage”, be it a training montage, a travel montage, or a montage of flashbacks. What happens next, I can best describe as the inner-child-work version thereof. Every time the organ hits another chord, I find myself in that shimmering greenish glow again, knocking on that same door, going on another bonding adventure. We trail run through autumn forests, we make artsy collages, we are having a movie evening with popcorn, cycling through France together, camping at mountain lakes, doing a silent book club, building a radio from scratch, throwing a party, just talking over a cup of hot chocolate, and among all of that, we are catching up on missed time and missed experiences. By the time the organ strikes and lingers on its last chord, we have become so much closer in a way I know is going to last.
Then, everything dies down. A single note is played first once, then twice, then falls into a rhythm. Its piano string is muted, an anxious hammering pulse swelling up and down in volume. A crystal clear piano scatters some uncertain notes around this muffled pounding. Swiftly, the muting disappears, but the pounding continues, always that same note. The tune evolves into a two-handed composition woven around this persistent pulse. It slowly simmers down, only to turn into what I can rightfully call a symphonic river of emotion. I’m just along for the ride. As the narrative evolves, the pounding thread becomes re-harmonized and culminates in a sense of purpose and resolve on which it abruptly ends. As the echo of that driving note still runs through me, I know it’s the end of her concert, but I also know that something within me has come to a conclusion.
I open my eyes.