In my opinion, there are a million great things about Switzerland: their various food products such as chocolate, cheese, and bread; their efficient and high quality products known all around the world such as the Swiss Army Knife; their location, which makes traveling easy and forces them to grow up with three or more languages from a very young age; the terrain of the immaculate Swiss Alps that I can’t ever get enough of no matter how long I stare or how many pictures I take; and last but not least, their culture of organization and reliability. It’s a hard decision, but besides the Alps, this aspect of Swiss life I find to be one of the best things about Switzerland…and apparently this lesson came at the perfect time for me.
Before I left for Switzerland, I got chewed out for not being as reliable as I should have been, therefore forcing someone else to do what I should have done. And you know what? That was definitely not the best feeling in the world. How coincidental then that I would spend a week in the most reliable place in the world…funny how that works. Anyway, this particular situation really ground my gears because it’s important to me that people know that they can count on me when something needs to be done. It was especially bothersome because I am usually, in my opinion, very reliable, so this forced me to reevaluate myself.
Though it wasn’t all that fun to think about, I feel fortunate to have been able to do so while surrounded by immense beauty. When something in my life seems like such a huge deal, I need something that will bring me outside of myself in order to see it from another perspective, and the grandeur of the Alps was that something this time. I spent quite a bit of time journaling and thinking, and more often than not, staring at the Alps while sitting on the terrace outside of my friend’s bedroom window. Whenever I looked at these gorgeous mountains, it’s as if all of my problems and all of the thoughts swirling around in my brain didn’t matter anymore; everything became so small in comparison.
I’m going to digress a bit here and tell you that in the summertime, Switzerland is unbelievably green. I went last year during the winter when everything was snowy and white, so this time it felt like a completely different place. The tallest of the mountains of course still have snow on top, but in the summer all of the shorter ones show off the emerald beauty they have that is concealed underneath the snow for the major part of the year. They feature a million brilliant shades of green, even some shades that I’ve never seen on a mountain before. Everything is vibrant, fresh, and alive. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the week was going up to a little bar/restaurant halfway up the mountain to see how Interlaken looks from a higher point of view. To get there we had to take a ten minute trolley ride, which was a fun new experience for me because as you ascend you start to see everything in a way you couldn’t if you were just walking around on foot. Anyway, as Mara and I started walking to the café, I noticed immediately how fresh the air was. It was the freshest, most crisp air I have ever had the pleasure to breathe into my lungs. I wanted to capture some in a jar to take home with me so that I would always have some on hand. It’s impossible to describe with words how it felt going through my respiration system, but it made me feel so grateful that pure air such as this still exists in the world, while also making me wish that it was like this everywhere. When I exhaled, all of the pollution in my mind went with it, leaving me feeling refreshed and ready to handle anything.
While I was speaking with Mara’s mother, the topic of adoption worked itself into the conversation. No, not child adoption; culture adoption. When you have the chance to travel and see how other people speak, eat, act, and live, you’re able to see your own culture from another perspective, as well as work in all of the aspects you find interesting in other cultures into your own. If you could take all of the best aspects of every culture in the world, you would have a really great personal culture, and it got me thinking; maybe I can’t improve American culture in general, but I can improve my own.
As stated before, I haven’t exactly been the most reliable person in the world, or the most organized for the past few weeks…well, I’ve never actually been very organized to be honest. So I think it’s the perfect time for me to adopt the organization and reliability aspect of Swiss culture into my life. This means keeping my room clean on a daily basis, writing down and sticking to a plan on what I can do to stay in Italy, writing more regularly than I have been, choosing the foods that make me feel good, and journaling more often to keep my thoughts from becoming a whirlwind of disaster. This also means that I need to take my work more seriously and do what needs to be done when it is asked of me, and even when it is not. This means being able to rely on myself, so that others know that they can rely on me. Even though this particular lesson has been kind of a rough one in the way it was handled, I’m glad it came anyway, because it made me realize that I can’t keep on living this way if I want to keep a level of peace in my life. When one or more areas is in disorder or chaos, it’s really hard not to let it affect others because everything is interconnected. It’s easy to think that it doesn’t matter if your room is always a mess, but it really is important because at least for me, the way I’ve been treating my room is the way I’ve been treating my life: throwing things to the side as if they don’t matter, letting things pile up so that it becomes one of the Alps instead of a rolling hill, waking up and going to sleep with an always un-made bed…Basta! Enough! I’m done acting as if the little things don’t make a difference.
In any case, I’m really glad that I don’t have to sign any adoption papers or go through strenuous interviews or live with a child who is likely to have some abandonment issues. Luckily all that is required of me to adopt aspects of culture is to keep an open mind, and while that is sometimes easier said than done, it’s a process I’m more than willing to endure.
