The Oldest Thing

It is the summer of 2010 when I sit under a maple tree, with three buckets of cutlery in front of me, for the first time.

My t-shirt clings to my skin, tethered by sweat. Long after midnight, the sultry air still sits between chairs and tables, like the last guest.

The park around the beer garden is tinted black. A lantern flickers close by, so I see my hands in shadows. Amid the whispers of trees and bushes, I hear my colleagues laughing as they drink the well-earned Feierabend beer. Somebody asks where we are going next. Techno music is playing. Sometimes the birds would begin singing. Sometimes the first light would appear in the sky.

I grab a few forks and knives, polish them, and slide them into paper bags. All summer, my weekends blurred into hot days, long shifts, and five euros an hour. That night, I said never again.

Yet in April of the following year, I found myself back under the maple tree, buckets of cutlery in front of me. I returned for a total of four seasons. Something kept pulling me back that I was not yet able to name.

Since then, I have felt it countless times. Walking toward a table, waiting at the reception desk, there is always that slight tension. An unspoken negotiation. Not yet knowing who is standing in front of me.

How do I receive you. How do you enter this space. What happens next.

In ancient Greece, hospitality was a sacred duty. Xenia — guest-friendship — was both a moral responsibility and a political imperative: the host offers shelter and protection, the guest returns loyalty and respect.

As gods walked among mortals, you could never know who was knocking on your door. Zeus Xenios was the patron of strangers and their protector. Refusing hospitality was a violation, unforgiven by the gods.

Across cultures and centuries, hospitality has been held as elemental. In the Hebrew Bible, Abraham receives three strangers at Mamre without knowing they are divine. In Islam, the guest is received as a blessing; to turn them away is to fail in your duty to God.

Centuries later, the French scholar Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt described hospitality as the virtue of a great soul that cares for the whole universe through the ties of humanity.

I learn, as I walk to work with earphones in, that the word host comes from the Latin hospes, meaning both host and guest, which shares its root with hostis, meaning stranger, and later, enemy. Both branch from the same Proto-Indo-European word: gʰóstis. The stranger.

From hospes came hospitality, hospital, hospice. From hostis came hostile, hostility.

The duality was always in the word itself.

Xenos meant stranger. Xenos also meant guest. And host.

Aren't we all. Guests and hosts and strangers.

In February, a young train conductor lost his life in Germany after a guest attacked him during a ticket control. A debate erupted about the protection of train workers, service workers. Shortly after, I discovered an article in the Swiss news: even on the Swiss mountain trains, the aggression is increasing.

Workers are verbally assaulted, threatened with being filmed, and exposed online.

I see this anxiety in people's faces and read it in comments. Someone argues before arriving, and another complains only at checkout when nothing can be changed. Between shifts, my colleagues and I talk about it like it's part of the job; the emotions stay at home.

The same faces shout on our screens, in comment sections, and in parliament. Somehow, we have lost the ability to negotiate.

Last Friday, riding the train from Thun after a workshop on intercultural competence for hospitality workers, I realized again how much this work teaches us.

The train passes mountains and lakes. I looked around: all of us on our phones.

We are swamped by heartbreaking headlines like that of Serkan C., may his heart rest in peace. As we scroll through atrocities followed by beaches and cats, hope erodes slowly.

We keep asking if we have lost humanity, as if humanity were something inherently good.

A gesture that shows respect in one culture is an offense in another. Eye contact, which here means trust, might cause discomfort elsewhere. To work in hospitality is to be continuously reminded that your way of seeing is not the only way of being.

It has been sixteen years. There are doubts and frustrations — the difficult guest, the bad shift, the temptation to categorize, label, and judge. It is easier to hold on to the one hard encounter when all the others were kind, curious, funny, and eye-opening.

It is easy to see the threat. To blame the other.

Everything else requires risking vulnerability.

I think of that girl under the maple tree, not yet aware of the meaning hospitality would find in her life: not just professionally, but as a way of approaching life.

It is the act of preparing a space for someone you do not yet know. It is a decision under uncertainty.

This is what I come back to when I put the phone face down and sit with the weight of it all. Not that it will get better. The human was always carried by both — the hostile and the hospitable. That won't change.

But the possibility exists in every encounter. That part has never been taken from me.

I cannot fix what is happening in the world. But I can decide how I meet the person in front of me.

Hospitality holds the tension between hostility and care. Every day, in small, almost invisible acts. To set tables, prepare beds and meals — to hold the door open into the uncertain air — is the oldest thing.

Who are we, in the moment before the stranger arrives.

Who do we choose to become, when they do.