Today was my last day at the IFOMPT conference in Basel, which is close to both France and Germany. So I decided to walk to the Three Countries Bridge from the Swiss side, into France and then cross the bridge into Germany.
I don’t know what I was expecting in terms of the border crossing, but it wasn’t a signpost off to the side of a pedestrian pathway.
I’m used to border crossings with lots of security, bag checks, body scans, and a general sense of unease and uncertainty. There’s a ceremony to the whole thing, where we all play our parts in the artifice.
But this morning there was none of that. No sense of crossing any kind of threshold or of achievement. No, “Welcome to our country that we have graciously allowed you to enter”.
This morning, I walked over a line on a map, exactly as if there was no line at all.