Affen Fangis

At the risk of opening this piece with about as much spark as a yellowed calendar page on your great-uncle’s writing desk, I’d still like to point to this one small truth: there is so much beauty, every single day.

I mean the light caught in the curtains this morning. Add a touch of wind, and everything looks staged. My coffee, which I might be drinking only for the milk and the warm cup cradled in my palm – already in bed, I’m looking forward to it. The purring bundle on my belly? That’s simply this cat creature who lives with us, who meows at me when we pass each other, and at night buries his nose into my armpit. And then there are the sleepy little faces of children sunken into fluffed-up duvets. I love everything about it. But it’s also just things like the apple crackers meant for the children’s school snack boxes, which I prefer to spread generously with a candied-almond paste and devour in large, contented bites before anyone else has set foot in the kitchen. With it, a song on the radio I haven’t heard in a long time. There is so much beauty, every single day.

My stock of small joys is vast. It contains memories, films, memes, quotes, particular kinds of crisps and my mother’s curls. It’s ample enough that I could swing from one to the next for days, even weeks, without ever having to touch the ground of reality. I have so many small joys that I can lend them out and give them away. I send them to my friends, and I tell my children about them: I show them mine and ask them about theirs. So we never forget how many there are. So we always know: somewhere, not far from the tip of my nose, something beautiful is dangling within reach – you only need to open your eyes and trustingly stretch out your arms.

Sometimes it’s the sudden turn that children so often give you, when they yawn in the middle of a serious conversation or ask a completely unrelated question and suddenly everything is light and funny again. Or it’s the bus driver who stops once more to pick me up, and it’s my small, proud sense of achievement at not having to send an apology for being late, just this once. It’s the drizzle that means no one sees me on my run, and that I don’t need an excuse later for starting a brilliant new series in the middle of the day. It’s the friend who calls, even though we both never tire of saying how dreadful we find phoning. And how, with practised ease, we prop our phones up against breadboxes or cornflake packets so our hands are free to illustrate every story, until we know once again exactly where the other’s life is at. It’s finding new small insights in fields where you thought you already knew everything. And it’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” by Céline Dion, which has been stuck in my head ever since I belted it out into the night last Saturday in the middle of a slightly tipsy women’s choir.

In unstable times like these, when you never know with what kind of push notification you’ll be starting the day, it helps to move through life now and then the way you used to in Affen-Fangis – the Swiss childhood game where you had to leap from one piece of climbing equipment to the next, or swing from rope to rope, without ever letting your feet touch the ground. As if the floor were lava, or something equally dangerous. In that game, you often had to launch yourself in hope, arms outstretched, simply trying and trusting that you’d make it to the next rope. Because: down there is lava. And in real life, it isn’t lava down there – but it might be MAGA, the lust for power, war and corruption. Pictures of desperate people. Hatred and suffering. And so many strange narratives spat out onto the internet, trying to unsettle us and contest our faith in what is good. That’s why sometimes I just don’t want to hear or know any of it. I want to hold on to what is good, I want to swing simply from one rope to the next, leap over a bench and, at the end, let myself fall onto a soft mat.

Sometimes it’s only in the evening that I feel in my tired arms the strength it must have taken to hold on to the good. And that’s fine, because I don’t want to forget the ground at all. I know in every moment that it’s there. I’m grown now, and gym class is long over. But I want to keep holding on to the ropes and swinging until my heart is light and strong. So that I can still walk a few steps over lava now and then, to tell those who have let go and don’t know ho