In Everyday Life
Accompanying someone is the art of looking in a way that allows a person to begin to see themselves again.
Some thoughts arise not on duty but along the way: at a reunion, in a voice message, on a hike. Everyday life is not too small for them.
On the Weather
After a hike up Ben Nevis.
Late June, Scotland. There are four of us, colleagues from years past who arrange to go hiking together once a year. This time: Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the country, from sea level up. The evening before, fish and chips, old stories, much laughter. In the morning we set off cheerfully, and we are not alone: young and old, groups and solitary walkers, hikers and trail runners, from many countries. People greet one another, let one another pass; British politeness walks with us.
Then it begins to rain. I put up my umbrella and provide amusement for everyone I meet – I am evidently the only person on this mountain who considers an umbrella a piece of hiking equipment. Halfway up, the rain becomes a downpour, the wind picks up, we climb into the clouds, the view disappears. It grows colder. We cross fields of snow. Anyone who stands still begins to freeze at once; teeth chatter, hands can no longer grip.
The strange thing is: the cheerfulness remains. Not as bravery, not as a slogan for gritting it out – it is simply there, in us and in everyone else. The stories people tell each other as they walk are louder than the rush of the rain. A hiker falls and bleeds from his forehead; he is looked after by whoever happens to be nearby. Nobody complains about the weather. As if everyone here knew that it is not negotiable.
At the summit we stop only for a photograph. We see nothing, it is pouring, the temperature is below freezing. So straight back down, just keep moving. The wind now drives the rain into our faces, we are soaked to the skin, and from somewhere we hear a helicopter. At some point on this descent I understand what holds this day. It is not the view; we have none. It is not the arriving; that was a photograph in the pouring rain. It is that no one here goes through this rain alone. The weather cannot be changed – who walks beside you can.
I could not help thinking of conversations in which it is much the same. Sometimes nothing can be changed about what is coming down on a person – no solution, no way out, no better weather in sight. Only one thing can be changed: whether they must go through it alone. Whether someone walks with them, step by step – and whether along the way there is even room for a story, for a laugh that makes light of nothing and still warms.
When we are back down after almost eight hours, the sky tears open. The sun shines as though nothing had happened. In the evening we sit over dinner, exhausted and in good spirits, and we agree: the day was terrible, but beautiful. And none of us could have said where the one ended and the other began.
The Way to the Tree
After a message.
On her birthday, a woman close to me wrote. It is a double day for her: her brother, who died two years ago, had his birthday on the same day. They still celebrate it together – only differently. Not an easy day, she wrote.
Then she told me about a tree. She chose it in the forest, for him. She brings things there: shells, a little sand, small hearts, stars made of bark. A little altar, she wrote – and the chance to embrace him. And then the sentence that is more modest than anything one can say about grief: It helps, sometimes.
Last year the altar was destroyed. Cleared away, removed – by whom, she does not know. The shells, the stars, the little heart: gone. A place built with one’s hands can be taken apart by hands as well. That is the vulnerability of all the signs we set up for our dead.
And today, on this double birthday, she is walking there again. That sentence has followed me since. Because it shows what cannot be removed: shells can be taken away, a wooden heart, a star of bark. The way a person walks to a tree, no one can clear away. The place was never what lay there. The place is that she goes.
Perhaps it is like this with all remembering. The signs are vulnerable – stones, photographs, a date in the calendar. The going is not. Whoever has a way needs no permission and no permanence of things; they can lose everything that lies at the end of it and still keep the destination.
By now she will have been there. Perhaps a shell already lies at the trunk again, perhaps not yet. The tree stands. And she knows the way.
Not Yet
While bouldering.
My bouldering partner and I have been climbing together for a while now. Talk happens in pieces: an attempt, a sentence, an attempt. Recently, between two attempts, she told me about her nephew. Three years old. In recent weeks he had been strikingly listless; then there was blood where none belongs, and in the examinations the doctors found a tumour. An operation lies ahead, and chemotherapy; he will lose a kidney. She worries about him, about her sister, about the boy's father. At the moment, she says, he is back home and outwardly taking it well.
Only later did I notice the tenses she had been speaking in. Everything heavy stood in the future tense: will be operated on, will lose, lies ahead. Only the boy himself appeared in the present. He is at home. He is taking it well. He is three.
A three-year-old does not know what a kidney is. Whether he understands what is in store for him, I do not know; the adults know it for him. They are already living in what is coming. He is living in this afternoon. Perhaps that is what she was telling me, without calling it that: what it is like to know the future tense of a child who himself lives entirely in the present.
Since then I pay attention to tenses in conversations. Worry almost always speaks in the future tense, and it is not wrong about that – what lies ahead really does lie ahead. You cannot talk it out of that, and you do not have to. But sometimes, for a moment, it is possible to share the present tense in which the other person is.
The operation is coming, the chemotherapy too. But at the moment – the words are hers – he is back home.
Organ and Trumpet
After a voice message.
A childhood friend sends me a voice message, a few minutes long. She has just come home and simply starts talking.
Some time ago I gave her my book as a present. It is still lying open in her flat, she says, not tucked away on a shelf; she leafs through it and looks at the letter that came with it.
She has a word of her own for what is in it. She calls such things campfire conversations.
At a campfire, a guitar helps: when the sausages are charred and someone can play, the evening somehow comes together. With organ and trumpet – our two instruments – we would not get very far.
Her word is not in the book. It fits.
At the end she thanks me for the book. I think it should be the other way.
A Serenade
After a reunion.
I meet an old school friend in a café. She tells me about her last big birthday.
She had not wanted a big celebration. Just a picnic in a park, with the family, nothing more. Then the day came, and it started badly: great heat, a thunderstorm in the forecast, bottles bursting in the hot car – and of the silver number floating above the car, the zero burst as well.
In the park, the thunder growled almost as soon as they had begun. A little boy asked who was turning six today. He was given a piece of cake.
And then, down the stream, came about eight people swimming – in wetsuits, on inflatable dinosaurs. They climbed out, congratulated her as if they had been invited, ate some of the cake, drank some of the sparkling wine, sang her a serenade – and after an hour they swam on.
Afterwards, she says, she was reconciled. You cannot plan life; and then it gives you something you could never have planned – or words to that effect.
She had planned the party. The best of it came down the stream.
On her telephone there are photos of the day.
In one of them, the six floats alone in the air.