Basel, August 2014. The air was thick with summer, the kind that hums in your ear and hangs in the corners of stairwells. We sat on the worn stone steps by the Rhine near Mittlere Brücke, paper cups in our hands, condensation slipping down the sides like the heat itself was trying to escape.
The sun was just starting to fall behind the roofs. Across the river, the windows of old buildings caught the light in a way that made everything look slightly unreal, like we were sitting in a painting someone had never quite finished. The smell of grilled onions drifted faintly from a street cart nearby. Somewhere, a kid played saxophone—not well, but loud enough to feel brave.
“You’ve changed,” she said.
It wasn’t an accusation, more like a soft fact she was holding up to the light, turning it in her hands.
I looked at her. Still the same careful eyes. Still the voice that could say more in silence than most people managed in paragraphs.
“Maybe,” I said, after a long breath. “It’s hard to tell when you’re the one inside it.”
She smiled at that, not because it was profound but because it was true.
There was a pause, the kind that only exists between people who have already survived awkwardness together.
“So,” she said, stretching her legs out in front of her, “what are you good at now?”
I took a sip of coffee. Lukewarm. Bitter. Exactly what I needed.
“For a while, I thought I had to be good at something impressive,” I said.
“You know—like building apps, or speaking five languages, or pretending I knew how wine worked.”
She laughed. “And now?”
“Now, I think I’m good at… waiting.”
Her eyebrows went up a little.
“Waiting?”
“Yeah. I mean it. I’m good at being still. At not forcing things. At learning slowly. I can sit in silence for hours without reaching for my phone. I can spend a day walking with no destination and feel like it meant something. I can be content with almost nothing, and not feel like I’m missing out.”
She didn’t say anything right away. Just held the cup close to her face, as if trying to drink the steam.
“You know,” she said after a while, “I remember when you first arrived here. Summer of 2014. You looked—how do I put this—like someone who’d just lost a fight he didn’t know he was in.”
I laughed. “That’s accurate.”
“You had that one bag, a sunburn, and no idea where your flat was.”
“Fifth floor in Gundeldingen. I remember climbing the stairs and wondering if I’d made a mistake.”
“And?”
“I had. But it turned out to be the right kind.”
I told her about that room again—how the window barely opened, how the air hung like warm soup. The bakery across the street that smelled like yeast and sugar. The electric fan that spun slowly and sighed like it was tired of being alive. No AC, of course. But at night, the streets were quiet. And if I left the window cracked, I could hear people talking from balconies—laughter, long pauses, the sound of plates being cleared.
I didn’t have much. A few books. A used kettle. A journal I kept meaning to write in but never quite did.
“But I sat still,” I said.
“I watched light move across the walls. I listened to the city like it was trying to tell me something. I made pasta and overcooked it and didn’t mind. I learned not to flinch when nothing was happening.”
“And it helped?”
“More than anything else.”
She turned and looked at me.
“That’s rare, you know. Most people panic in that space.”
“I used to. But at some point, I realized stillness wasn’t absence. It was attention. I just hadn’t learned how to notice it yet.”
She tapped her finger on her cup. “You sound like someone who’s been meditating in the mountains.”
“Just sweating in a hot room above a bakery.”
She laughed again.
—
The river moved quietly behind us, wide and forgiving. A family passed, pushing a stroller. The baby pointed at the water. The mother smiled like she’d seen that look a hundred times and it still didn’t get old.
“I think we underestimate how powerful it is,” I said. “To want less.”
She looked at me. “You mean like minimalism?”
“Not really. I mean not craving things. Not needing every day to be exciting. Not needing recognition. Not needing your apartment to look like it belongs in a magazine. Just… learning to be where you are.”
“And be okay with that?”
“Not just okay. Grateful. Because the moment you stop needing more, everything gets brighter. The coffee. The walk. The silence.”
She nodded slowly. “Like a kind of wealth.”
“Exactly. The kind you can’t see, but you can carry.”
—
What You Learn from Stillness
We sat for a while without talking. The saxophone player had stopped. The breeze had returned, soft and aimless.
“You know,” she said, “I think people confuse stillness with laziness. Or passivity. But you’ve changed my mind a little.”
“I think we all need to,” I said. “Because the truth is, being still is one of the hardest things you can do. Waiting without resentment. Learning without proving. Being content without being numb.”
“And you’re good at that now?”
“I’m learning. But yes. I think it’s the one thing I’m good at. Sitting with life long enough to let it show me where to go next.”
She leaned her head back against the stone.
“You’d be surprised how few people can do that.”
“Yeah,” I said, and watched a leaf land gently on the surface of the river,
“but you’d also be surprised how much it gives you back.”
And neither of us spoke for a while after that.
Because some truths, when spoken aloud, don’t need echo.
They just need time.
life 