In the mornings, after making my daily loop through traffic and reminding the children not to leave their water bottles behind in the school drop-off line, I come home, walk across the living room, and crank up the four outside shutters, or rollläden, from where they are covering several full-length windows. Then, I rotate the handles on each set of windows so that they are horizontal—in line with one another—and pull them open wide.
The process takes only a few seconds. But with the windows open, the environment shifts. The crisp air drifts inside, curls around my legs, and makes its way through the center of the room. I can hear the ongoing sounds of the outside world: pigeons cooing our backyard, sirens sounding a long eee–ooo, and maybe—if the timing is right—the church bells offering a song.
This is the daily ritual of lüften, the German practice of airing out one’s home each day. I received my early instruction in this practice from the woman who supervised our move-in process. During a walk-through, she showed us how to operate the windows and doors. Most windows in Germany open in multiple directions: handles down means the window is locked, handles sideways means they pull open, and handles turned up creates a tilt, allowing the window to lean backwards, gently cracking open at the top.
“Every day, you should open up all the windows and doors for a few minutes,” the woman said, instructing us in the practice of keeping a home here.
“All of them?” I asked. “So, we just crack them at the top?”
The woman’s face registered a mixture of shock and horror at my American thinking. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “They must be all the way open.”
Lüften, I have since learned, is a practice with many purposes: to prevent mold inside houses built without central ventilation, to provide the health benefits of fresh air, and to bring in cooler air on hot days, since most homes have no air conditioning.
These rules are very different from what I learned growing up in central Kansas, where we were always battling with the outside world. The Midwestern air was always too hot, too cold, too windy, too allergenic, too full of mosquitoes, too something.
“Shut the door! You’re letting out all the cool air!” my mother said on repeat.
Germany is not immune to the problems of the outdoors, of course, especially since there are no screens on the windows. Giant flies regularly come inside, and when the weather is especially warm, we welcome bees or unsavory German roaches. I assure you I have done a fair amount of battling with German bugs (I’m looking at you, carpet beetles).
Even so, I’ve noticed that here, the outside air is not something to always keep out. The relationship between the inside and outside world is more fluid— the air moving more freely between the two.
***
I can’t decide if I should apologize for slipping away into quietness for the last year. A dear friend told me apologies are unnecessary, and I suppose she is right. After all, I believe that a healthy life involves seasons of quiet, and I seem to need more of those seasons than most people I know. So instead of a confession, perhaps I can offer some narration.
Around this time last fall, while working through some material on creating a rule of life, I began reckoning with some of the changes this big transition had brought—not just for our family, but also for me, personally. I realized that I needed some space to get quieter, to allow myself to catch up to the change and metabolize some of the shifts.
Somehow, a whole year went by.
Nothing about the past year has been slow or quiet in real life—far from it! Our life has been absolutely chock full of living, exploring, and learning. I have been writing my way through it, but it’s been difficult for me to share when so many of my words feel half-baked and undercooked. Everything needs to sit in the slow cooker for a few months (maybe years).
“I’m taking so much in, and I can’t process it all,” I told my friend Missy, recently. “All I have to offer are these little snippets.”
“How could you take the pressure off?” she asked.
The next day, I sat down in my living room and thought about that question. My eyes wandered over to our windows and I remembered the German practice of lüften, the way it invites air into the room, if only for a few minutes. I considered the way it opens everything up.
Writing has always been my form of lüften, a way I move between my interior and exterior worlds, between inner soul and outer living. In the midst of hefty transitions or lots of noise, I usually need to get very quiet and work some things out for myself—an impulse that has often served me.
But left to my own devices, I tend to stay in that tucked-away place for too long. One of the things I’ve learned about airing out a home is that the risks of keeping things closed up can sometimes be greater than the risk of opening up, at least for a few minutes, just to let a cross-breeze in. With the windows open, wasps may fly in and we will have to chase them around, trying to shoo them back outside, but wasps are easier to deal with than mold.
The ongoing invitation of my writing practice seems to mirror what I am learning in my real life: to surrender to the process, both in the times of being tucked away, and in seasons of reopening things, again.
Recently, I have sensed the air shifting. I’m ready to practice a little lüften again in this writing space, alongside you. It’s true that most of what I have to offer right now are merely snippets—only a few short moments of story or contemplation. But maybe something I am observing will help open an inner window for you, too.
This morning, just after I opened up all the windows, I sat on the couch and listened to the outside world longer than usual. The leaves shuffled around and rustled against each other, and the membrane between the inside and outside felt thinner, as though the air was ready to move around a bit more freely.
Since I’ve been gone …
Here’s a piece I wrote for Coffee + Crumbs. Although it was published in the spring, the heart of the piece remains true. We are loving our time overseas, but the cycles of homesickness still ebb and flow for all of us.
“The expat experience, as it turns out, is always an act of holding two things together: where you came from and where you are. You find reminders of home mysteriously tucked into low-hanging clouds, pancake platters, even the flat line of the horizon.”
Read more: On Heimweh
"How could you take the pressure off?" -- now that's a gem of a question :) What a goldmine here today, sis!
Jenna, what a delight to find you in my inbox this morning! Your writing is captivating and convicting.