here's how you change the past

Without a slight downshift towards ease there will be no big solution.

Lake Zurich is glassy below and beyond the dining room – the restaurant version of an infinity pool. It’s breakfast time. Bella is asleep. I’m waiting on scrambled eggs with Gruyere. I have fresh orange juice.

Two grey-haired Swiss in identical striped wetsuits carry a racing shell to a sawhorse sling on the dock. They prepare, and prepare. In the meantime, a 20-something guy with a cap on his wetsuit tries to launch a self-propelled wakeboard, falls, and tries again and again.

Another guy kicks off flip flops and deftly slides the same type of wakeboard along the far edge of the dock, then takes a small hop onto the board and immediately, rhythmically squats 15 degrees to gain momentum. Once going, apparently you still can’t stop the squatting.

The successful launcher is out of sight around the edge of the hotel and North towards the old town, still pumping the board, no doubt. It’s impossible to remount the thing from in the water. No one even tries.

The first guy has surpassed 30 attempted launches by now. Each time, he has to push it back up onto the dock then climb out of the water.

There’s an Italian crooner on the radio, plaintive and earnest, with that slightly circusy 80s vibe. He means it. Switzerland is buttoned up, even the Italian elements. If you order the pasta at Hotel Alex Lake Zurich, it’s nicely arranged on the plate. The walls in the dining room are glass. The room is warming as the sun moves higher.

The Alps are to the South. The last time I saw the Swiss Alps I was maybe 11 years old. The time I spent here was complicated and paradoxical – grand memories, great beauty, conflict. There were about 4 trips between 7 and 11.

Humans have a built-in protective mechanism that recalls unsafe memories, so we can identify and theoretically avoid similar scenarios. This mechanism often backfires.

I might spend breakfast in Zurich in the hard drive folder where Alpine meadows with cowbells were the backdrop for unpleasant human behaviours. I also got to have my own pizza every day at lunch, cooked in a wood-fire oven at a creperie.

I am also here, now, for a work opportunity that has also allowed me a leisurely breakfast over a lake while I await my fiancee who will be happy to see me, likely even tell me she missed me while she was sleeping.

It’s good to be here now.

On those old Swiss trips, each day while waiting on my beloved Margherita I went by myself to the buffet and took a few forkfulls of julienned carrot salad to feel like an adult eating vegetables. Each trip there would be one fondue night. There was something special, as a kid, about taking my own stab of bread and getting exactly the amount of cheese I wanted. Autonomy.

Mornings often meant pain au chocolat if I was willing to drink the milk that tasted weird. Now I would love the full cream Swiss liquid gold. A pretty good bargain for a boy.

There was skiing with Marcel, a friend of a friend of my mom’s who taught me that to ski the moguls you must absorb the moguls. There was the time Marcel and I ran into two of his friends. They both wore headbands with flowing hair, and sunglasses with leather swatches at the edge of the lenses that were the coolest thing back then. They were beautiful women who could really ski. I was a speechless eleven year old boy.

Marcel introduced me as a great young skier from America. We took two runs together, and I sat between them on the lift.

All of these reminiscences of Switzerland are to point back to how I began this piece, with a reminder to you that without a slight downshift towards ease there will be no big solution. Without that downshift there may just be problems you don’t need to solve.

I don’t need to solve my past and you don’t either.

We can go into the past to reflect, but we cannot return. We cannot change what was but we can ever so slowly change who we are now and in so doing, change our relationship to what was, if we want to.

The self is not hidden deep inside waiting to be found. The self is who we become each day with our smallest choices and our gentlest disciplines.

Bella is here at breakfast now, and it’s time to be present.

I love her. I love you for reading this. I am grateful for love.