If the world were to stand still, the risk of injury would seem high

Can I show you something we did to warm up?” S. sighs, lies down on the soft mat in front of the bouldering wall and waits for me to sit on her. I was at my first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class—adult ground wrestling—on Monday, hence her concern that she was about to endure one of my clumsy attempts at a lever hold. Already on Wednesday a mutual friend of ours had to believe it.

"No, get up! I wanted to show you how we crawled across the floor," I say, moving across the mat like a shrimp. The risk of injury seems very high to me, I don't know if I want to go there again," I confess to her as I get up that Friday evening. "Yes, I also have the feeling that you're doing it for the plot. To tell people about it," she says and stands at the next route.

I'll stop for a moment. Do things only happen when we talk about them? Am I living too much for the stories I tell others? To entertain them with funny anecdotes? Like a court jester?

I think back to Thursday evening. I was sitting with a friend in the Deutsches Theater, where Jan Friedrich was currently staging Dorothee Elmiger's “The Dutch Women”. An entertaining piece with a great stage design (“how much did all the wooden paneling cost,” asks F. enthusiastically). The stage is about two young Dutch women who disappear one day in the Central American rainforest and a theater group that investigates them. But the focus is more on the funny to scary anecdotes that the theater group members report on their journey. They tell moving stories about goats giving birth, greasy hands or men riding horses.

And yet, in the end, you always reveal more about yourself than you intended at the beginning. Nobody is interrupted, everyone gets their space, and I now ask myself, which stories do we listen to and which do we not?

On Saturday I walk through the rain in Kreuzberg with a thick coat. Dozens of colorful umbrellas push past people on Rio Reisen Square. They want to listen. Listen to people who have been through a lot in the past few days, who have lost security, whose voices are often listened to far too rarely. On October 18, Berlin police raided the queer center Casa Kuà during a meeting for trans women. More than 2,500 people stand tightly packed around the small stage, holding signs and hugging each other, listening to the speakers, laughing, clapping and crying.

They write “Hands off Trans lives” and “Protect the Dolls” on brown cardboard boxes and proudly carry them through the neighborhood.

Two hours later, cold and wet, I push myself back through the Saturday strollers to the Kottbusser Tor. They're sitting in the second-hand shop and café, why doesn't everyone go to the demonstration when they're nearby, close their shops briefly, drink their coffee a little later, I think a little naively.

As a child, I was firmly convinced that the world would stand still when there was a World Cup and Germany was playing. Everyone then sits at home in front of the television. Nobody is on the street. It was clear to me even back then that only my Babcia, her red and white tea towel and I saw the Polish games. But if Germany plays, I thought, that's a priority. Why not put this childish fantasy into practice? The community takes a break for cohesion, for solidarity, leaves everything behind and looks and listens. I wish it were like that in Kreuzberg right now.