My last days living in Switzerland are looming. Two weeks and I’ll be back across the pond, the sun rising hours later on a completely different body of water. As the time draws nearer, I realize that:
One, I’m getting really impatient with things that drive me nuts about Switzerland.
Two, I’m already feeling nostalgic about the things that I love about Switzerland. Continue reading
This morning after Brendan left – very early – to take the first written exam in his series of maturité exams, I decided to be really decadent and go back to bed for a few minutes. Marc was in the bathroom getting ready for his day – humming and humming and humming.
No recognizable tune, just a series of little contented-sounding hums.
It reminded me of a passage I read yesterday in “What I Loved” by Siri Hustvedt.
Lying on a bench, contemplating the heavens. Soon there will be leaves on these branches…
Once a year Lausanne hosts a big natural/holistic medicine fair called “Mednat.” I went a couple of years ago and picked up some essential oils that smelled like the pine forests back in New Mexico. This year, the headline promised an “Agrobiorama Expo” which, to me, sounded like organic farm type stuff. (“Bio” is French for organic.)
Maybe the woman with heavy green eye shadow and ivy growing in her hair on the expo’s homepage should have clued me in …
Thanks to my friend Matt, who gave me a copy of “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer, I can no longer eat factory farmed meat (even in Switzerland, where rules and regulations are at least 300% stricter than in the US). So, thinking I would find some sources of organic produce, chickens, eggs and beef, I paid the 17-franc entry fee.
“There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.” – Pink Floyd
Where do ideas come from? How many of us wake up in the morning and say, Gee, I think I’m gonna to have myself a great idea today!
Not me.
In general, the harder I try to think up something original, the slower my brain goes until it ultimately screeches to a stop and I have to go play a game of Scramble or eat jelly bellies to get it going again. Continue reading
Last day of April. MAYDAY! just about captures my mood, too.
While Kate and William were tying the knot, I was sitting in a doctor’s office getting sucker-punched.
Sucker punch: a blow made without warning, allowing no time for preparation or defense on the part of the recipient. It is usually delivered from close range or from behind.
It wasn’t the doctor who delivered the blow, but the blood pressure cuff attached to my left arm. Very close range, indeed.
Oh, that’s high, the nurse says, shaking her head.
That’s strange, I say. I can’t think of anything more to add.
The doctor comes in and asks me about my foot, which had been hurting since mid-October, when I had made a Cardinal Mistake: I changed brands of running shoes. That was why I was here. For my foot! He asks me to stand, relaxed. How can I stand, relaxed, when number one, I am in my underwear and number two, I have just learned that my blood pressure is abnormally high? I do my best. He looks at my feet and smiles.
Why are you smiling? I ask.
Your right foot is bending outwards. C’est remarquable.
I look down. Sure enough, I’m standing on the outside of my right foot, to avoid the pain in the heel. Glad he finds it amusing.
He doesn’t say anything about my blood pressure. I got the x-rays, got fitted for special insoles, signed up for six sessions of physical therapy. My foot is in good hands. My mental state, however, is not.
On the way home I stop by a pharmacy and test the blood pressure a second time. Same numbers.
I don’t understand, I say. I run 4-5 times a week. I’m not overweight.
Maybe you’re stressed? asks the pharmacist. It can change depending on what you’ve eaten. Did you drink coffee recently?
Who, Me? Stressed? STRESSED? I only have about a million translations piled up that are all due in about five minutes! It’s spring break and I haven’t done yoga in two weeks! My teenage son has gone off to Geneva with a bunch of kids I don’t know! The weeds are taking over my garden at a record rate! Why would I be stressed?
Breathe in. Breathe out. Ommmmm.
At home, instead of writing the riveting blog post about ___ that I’d been planning, I spend the next four hours scouring the net for information on hypertension and entering a mild existential crisis. I call my mom for reassurance.
Dad had high blood pressure, and I do too. It’s genetic. But mine was never that high. That’s not good! You’d better see a doctor! I did. He looked at my foot. My anxiety goes up a notch.
I’ve lived my whole life under the assumption that I’m the walking embodiment of health. My mantra: everything in moderation. But I’ve been sucker punched! My body is something other than I thought it was. There’s stuff going on in there that I didn’t know about. Genetic stuff! I’ll get a handle on it, this is not that serious, but my bubble is burst in a big way. I’m not invincible. I’m not 25 anymore. We’re not in Kansas, Toto!
My advice for the royal couple? Live life to the limit. Piffle protocol. Be young and invincible. Be beautiful and strong. It goes by so fast, and you only get this one shot. Oh, and get a checkup once every couple of years. You might avoid getting sucker-punched in the orthopedist’s office.
I’ve been asked to translate the introduction to a Nordic walking book. Initially, I was very excited – this could be my big breakthrough into book translating! – but those hopes were dashed when the author explained that the translated text would be sent by her Swiss publisher to an agent in North America, and if it was accepted, it would be farmed out to a translator there.
Well, never mind, a job’s a job, so I get started. I don’t Nordic Walk, so I’m confident I’ll at least learn something new in the process.
One word keeps popping up, jarring my translating flow: bien-être. This is roughly translated into English as “wellbeing.” Nordic Walking, it turns out, is not only a total body workout (it uses 90% of your muscles!), but it also makes you feel good about yourself. But every time I type “wellbeing,” it feels stilted and awkward. I realize it’s not a word that Americans use much. We love talking about exercise, weight loss, cardiovascular health, muscle tone — did I mention weight loss? Lose Weight! Get a Total Body Workout! I guess the implication is that if you’ve got all those bases covered, it’s obvious that you’re going to feel good about yourself. If your body is buff, what more do you need? Wouldn’t saying that you’ll have a sense of wellbeing be redundant?
More to the point, isn’t it totally subjective? How can you compare something as vague as “wellbeing” with numbers of calories per mile or target heart rate or the percentage of your muscles you’re using? What has a higher bien-être index: an hour of Nordic Walking outdoors with your friends or a sweaty session on a Stairmaster? Can’t we measure brain waves or something? Please?
I often pass groups of Nordic Walking ladies, marching along with their poles and chatting away, as I run along the lake. They look happy. But then maybe they’d be happy anyway, even without the poles. The depressed ones are curled up on the couch at home, watching reruns of Friends. But that’s the thing: bien-être is more than just happiness. It’s a deeper concept, a state of being. It has to do with tranquility, a sense of peace, of all being right with your world.
Why would the word describing this concept be used more in Europe (well, at least in the French-speaking countries, I can’t vouch for the others) than across the pond? Sure, Europe has had a lot more serious angst to deal with in the last couple of centuries than the US has. A couple of world wars, the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Maybe that has something to do with it. But then, look at the crazy yoga boom in the US. Even though it often masquerades as a total body workout, yoga also has a non-negligible karma component. All the marketing gimmicks aside (Yoga clothing? Yoga magazines?), I’m convinced there’s some big cultural thing going on here. Maybe we’re entering a kind of national existential crisis. Maybe Americans are finally starting to see that wellbeing isn’t something you can buy or something you can attain by working really hard, but something more elusive that has to be nurtured from within.
I read an article in an actual paper copy of the Sunday New York Times (thank you Matt at BooksBooksBooks) not too long ago about Jack LaLanne and his role in turning physical fitness into a moral issue in the US. This is key, I’m almost sure of it. In the US, you exercise because it’s a virtuous thing to do. If you don’t, you’re a worthless slothlike sack of flab. Working out thus gives you the heady feeling of — an absence of guilt. That’s a far cry from wellbeing in my book. Nobody cares about wellbeing. We just want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without an overwhelming surge of self-loathing.
There’s certainly some of this exercise-as-higher-virtue going on in Europe, too (thank you, globalization) but I don’t think it’s as pervasive. The Swiss are certainly into extreme sports, but it’s more a question of how crazy they can be than how buff they are. So when my Nordic Walking enthusiast counts bien-être as one of the benefits of her sport, I’m sure she means it. I just wish I knew how to translate it.