Thick Fog Blankets the Sky
August 17–22, Zug, Switzerland
Seasonal Memoir Entry #21
There is a mindfulness adage that states “life is our practice”. How true. We can practice meditation in a workshop or at a retreat, but it’s meeting the full catastrophe of living (Jon Kabat-Zinn) with intention that is the real challenge. This week most certainly ticks that box.
It wasn’t exactly a series of misfortunate events, but more like a series of “if it could go wrong, it will” and “if you could make it much more difficult than it needs to be, you will”. After getting by in a perfectly fine shoebox of an Airbnb directly above an English pub at the Zug train station (a story for another day), muddling by with a vague sense of how things work in Switzerland, I was ready to move into my furnished long-term flat 2.5km from the school.
After a bit of an awkward encounter with the Airbnb owner, who said my booking had ended a few hours earlier (oops, oversight!), I cycled a few km to school in the 90F heat and humidity (unusual for Switzerland), borrowed the electronic car (Zoe), and drove back to the Airbnb to load the five pieces of luggage. I was finally out of that place. The short drive to Hunenberg was uneventful, as I mostly marveled at the electric car experience. I got to the flat, and the house key was not in the safebox, as promised. I sat there for a good 15 minutes, staving off panic.
As it was Sunday, and everything is closed on Sunday (I have learned), and the letting agent wasn’t even answering the “emergency line”, I was stuck. So I sat in the car (A/C on), thinking about what to do. I was tired, and I had more preparation to do that evening for the first faculty meeting of the school year. I decided not to bother anyone at the school (mainly to ensure I could get work done), so I did a quick search for hotels, and found the only one that was not $300+ a night, which turned out to be close to school, and perfectly fine. It was a boutique place called Andi’s Bnb, with a few small, but clean rooms, and a communal area. Crisis averted.
I won’t bore you with the rest of the week’s mishaps, but I basically trudged through rain (at the most inopportune times), wearing wrinkly work clothes (I had an iron, but I’ve learned ironing is not a superpower I possess), showing up at the local grocery mere minutes after they closed (and thus eating peanut butter for dinner), eating cold food for four days before being told that the induction stovetop needs weight to make it work, and establishing “generally sweaty and disheveled” as my primary look around village and school.
It became so comical that rather than getting upset, I just had to laugh, and let things slowly unfold until things worked out. And they did. And in doing so, I discovered lots of little “wins” along the way, like the off-the-map walk to school through farmland rather than along the busy road, like the farmer’s market on Saturday that blew away the supermarket, like the white flowers growing amidst the rows of corn, like the inexpensive local cheese that I had no idea what it was when I bought it (but tasted like my favorite Beaufort from France). It reminds me of the Buddha’s quote, “The lotus flower blooms most beautifully from the deepest and thickest mud.” How true.
