In the early hours of Sunday morning I was riding my mountainbike. I love it. Everyone is still asleep. My son, everyone in our house, almost the whole city of Zurich. It is just me and the trees. It’s not warm anymore but not cold either. The forest smells wonderful after last nights rain. I pedal uphill and enjoy the effort.

I love feeling my muscles straining to overcome the rising hills, when I start sweating and feel the wind on my face. I also adore the feeling of cycling downhill so fast, that you can’t pedal to accelerate even a tiny bit more.

The wind is whistling in my ear and the silence is only interrupted by the sounds of birds. Then there’s the average pathways, where I can look around to try and spot any changes in the scenery that have happened since the last time I came through.

I was riding my bike along one of these relaxing pathes when TOC TOC TOC, something hit my helmet three times. It didn’t hurt but it really scared me. “What was that?”, I thought to myself. I got off the bike and went looking. Even though I’d been riding this route many times, I realized only then, that there was a tree full of walnuts overlapping the path. After a storm the night before, many walnuts had fallen from that tree.

By then, I was quite sure, that the three nuts hitting my head were meant for me and that I would need to take them home. But how was I to find them amongst all the others? There were dozens of walnuts on the ground, so the only thing that made sense was a process of eliminiation. I started to collect the nuts and improvised a backpack out of my light jacket. When it was full I went back to my bike and cycled home, which was a bit tricky as my backpack was quite makeshift.

I still managed to bring them home safely and spent the morning peeling nuts. At the end, three of them remained untouched as those were meant to be a surprise. I am not expecting a ball gown cinderella-style more like chinese fortune cookies offering a message at a time, when some divine input is needed. So for now, those three nuts stay on my shelf waiting to fulfill their purpose. I do hope they won’t disappoint me. The rest of them, we simply ate.