summer

Once again I installed myself at the Landesmuseum library with the assignment to write and post *something* before going back to to my usual routine of moping around the apartment, wondering when the weather will cool down, and trying to figure out what we are going to do for the kids' upcoming three weeks of summer vacation. The summer plan so far: mope around the apartment and hope the weather will cool down.

This is, of course, ridiculous. There are so many awesome swimming opportunities in Zurich! And so many other gorgeous and fully public-transit-accessible Swiss activities waiting to be enjoyed. With luck we will pull ourselves together, slather on the sunscreen, and venture out. Or if not, maybe I will pull myself together and get some reading done. Before the Landesmuseum, I was haunting the underground stacks of the Zentralbibliothek and five (5) books leapt into my backpack. As they are wont to do.

One of the five is "Religious Experiencing: William James and Eugene Gendlin," a published version of the 1987 Ph.D. dissertation of Augustinian priest John J. Shea. How exactly it found its way to the university library in Zurich, or onto my books-to-look-at list, I'm not sure - but I'm a big fan of both philosophers and it appears to be short and sweet, so I'm excited to dig in.

Maybe it will help me work myself out of my current what-is-my-life hole, which lately only seems to be getting deeper. The longer I think about what to do next, the more dire the situation seems. Why do I get so tied in knots about things that seem to come so naturally to other people? Example: we had a choir dinner last week. I was sitting with the choir director and two doctors, successful women all, as they chatted about their work lives and extended families and vacation plans and the many languages they speak and I just sat there with not a single thing to add to the conversation, feeling more dumb and hopeless by the minute. Is this neurodiversity? Anxiety? Am I just that out of place in here? I feel like being American would be awkward enough in this situation, but I don't even have a good handle on that, so in a place where identities and roles are everything, I'm just routinely very lost.

And/or: I was looking at Eugene Gendlin's "experiencing scale" this morning, and I wonder if perhaps I feel atypically uncomfortable with conversations around stages 1 and 2 ("The speaker tells a story...") - where it seems everyone else likes to hang out - and on the other hand unusually comfortable around stage 4 ("Feelings or the experience of events, rather than the events themselves, are the subject of the discourse"). Like, depth is theoretically good, but I'm perennially on the wrong wavelength. One does not chat about existential angst during the choir dinner, regardless of how sleep deprived one is because climate change has made it too hot in one's apartment...

I have been managing to venture out occasionally: last weekend to Einsiedeln, where the sky was stunningly blue and the temperature a very refreshing four degrees cooler than Zurich. You'll have to click through to see it, but I love how someone added the little "danke!" to the end of this grumpy no trespassing sign.