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Olivia El Sayed

All These Worlds

When I received the invitation to speak here today, I was delighted. But as soon as I sat down to write this speech, I found myself wondering: Is it really right that I’m here?

Am I knowledgeable enough? Do I know enough about Bach? And are four weddings and a funeral really sufficient qualifications to stand here, at the front of a church, thinking out loud?

This isn’t really my world.

And I have to admit: there was some truth to those doubts. Classical music. Churches. And, perhaps above all, clothes without creases or coffee stains—none of that is particularly my world.

And yet, it is exactly right that I’m here today.

And that you are here too.

We tend to feel uncertain whenever we enter a world we believe we don’t naturally belong to. Uncertainty isn’t always comfortable, but in the right measure it teaches us humility. It reminds us of something important: we don’t know everything.

In fact, we never know everything.

There is, of course, that familiar type of person—found in many different versions—who believes they know absolutely everything and confidently declares:

“I CAN ENGLISH! I CAN EVERYTHING!”

Needless to say, they are usually the very person who can do neither.

There is so much I don’t know. So much I have yet to discover. And more than that: one single lifetime—my lifetime—will never be enough to know everything there is to know, no matter how hard I try.

If you follow that thought through, it also means something wonderfully reassuring:

No one else knows everything either.

And that, to me, is precisely why uncertainty can always be replaced by curiosity.

Because whenever I dare to step into worlds other than the one I effortlessly belong to, I learn something new. I discover perspectives I didn’t have before. Of course, I still won’t know everything afterwards—but I’ll know a little more than I did before.

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I grew up with a devout Muslim father and a mother who had always preferred believing in herself to believing in any man—whether that man happened to live in the same house or somewhere up in heaven.

My father was a romantic.

My mother is a pragmatist.

My mother tells the truth.

My father preferred telling the best possible version of it.

One of his favourite sayings was:

“Just because something isn’t correct doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

It sounds almost philosophical.

In reality, however, it mostly described how far he was willing to go in learning German—which was only up to a certain point.

After that, things simply acquired the names he personally considered more appropriate—or perhaps even better.

Even after twenty years in Switzerland, he still quite naturally called the country Suisland.

His favourite football player, Miroslav Klose, became Mister Klaus, and he genuinely couldn’t understand why nobody knew whom he was talking about.

Even Jesus received an unsolicited new name.

My father called him Jesus Crisis.

Entirely by accident, he always insisted.

Angela Merkel, on the other hand, emerged from his mouth sounding almost heavenly:

Angel Miracle.

His rather flexible understanding of right and wrong sounded very much like the philosophy of someone who probably shouldn’t have married a schoolteacher whose worldview was simply:

“Right is right, and wrong is wrong.”

But then again—

Love is love.

And here we are.

Growing up between these two worlds—which, incidentally, differed from one another in countless other ways as well—taught me many things.

Perhaps the most important lesson was this:

What is normal for one person is almost never normal for someone else.

For that to be true, one person doesn’t have to come from North Africa and the other from the Canton of Zurich.

Just think of your own brother or sister.

Even siblings who grow up under the same roof, with the same parents, in the very same family, rarely share exactly the same idea of what is normal.

Perhaps my normal really is spending four hours a day typing into my phone—and being allowed to call it work.

My normal is also never visiting my father’s grave, because I simply don’t feel that he is there.

My normal is being too afraid to jump off diving platforms or to learn how to drive a car.

But my normal is also frozen raspberries covered in chocolate.

Freshly edited manuscripts.

Coffee every other Tuesday with the woman who helps me keep my home organised—a woman who fled her own country and who sometimes tells me about that journey.

My normal is spending hours talking with my children.

Organising things late into the night.

And hearing someone clumsily practising the piano far too early the following morning.

It is a mixture of good decisions and not-so-wise ones.

But through all of it runs an enduring sense of optimism—an almost instinctive trust in the world that I sometimes can’t fully explain, even to myself.

That is the backpack I carry through life.

If I want to understand what is normal for the people I meet along the way—people carrying backpacks entirely different from my own—I first have to leave my comfort zone.

I have to step into their world.

I have to learn their language, their concepts, their ways of seeing things.

Only then can we truly understand one another.

I’ve always felt this principle should be obvious to everyone.

But then again—

What feels obvious to me isn’t automatically obvious to you.

And simply because something makes perfect sense to me doesn’t mean it does to someone else.

Besides, not everyone wants to leave their own world.

Neither do I.

Not every day.

Sometimes I’d much rather stay quietly inside my own little shell.

Because turning uncertainty into curiosity requires energy.

One sentence from my university studies has stayed with me more than any other. It comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein:

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

What he meant was that everything we are able to think and understand must, in some way, be expressed through language. If we lack the words or concepts for something, we also lack the ability to fully grasp it. And that, in turn, defines the boundaries of our world.

My father and I did not share the same native language.

What a loss—that we simply let the key to each other’s worlds slip through our fingers.

He learned my language only up to a certain point.

And I spoke his even less well than he spoke mine.

As a result, there were many things he never understood about me—and just as many things I never understood about him.

Inevitably, that led to misunderstandings.

Some of them were tragic.

Many of them were hilarious.

One of my favourites is this:

For years, I genuinely believed my father thought I had looked like a little monkey when I was born.

Whenever he spoke about my birth, he would proudly tell people:

“For me it was glich she looked like aff.”

Only many years later, during an Arabic language course, did I learn about an old Arabic proverb that translates roughly as:

“Even to a monkey’s mother, her child looks like a gazelle.”

And there I was, sitting in this brightly lit classroom, surrounded by complete strangers, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

That was what he had meant all those years.

He hadn’t been saying I looked like a baby monkey.

He had simply been saying how happy he was that I existed.

No matter what I looked like.

Monkey or gazelle—it made no difference.

He was simply grateful that I was there.

And I couldn’t help wondering:

How many other things between us remained unresolved simply because we lacked the language?

And how many things in the wider world remain unexplained, unspoken, or undiscovered for exactly the same reason?

Because we don’t know.

Or because we’re too uncertain to take a step towards someone else.

Too hesitant to look beyond the edge of our own plate.

Too afraid to enter another person’s world.

If we did that a little more often—

if we asked one more question,

looked a little more carefully,

listened a little more closely—

perhaps uncertainty would more often become curiosity instead of fear, aggression, or rejection.

And perhaps openness itself might begin to feel normal.

Because we are all different.

But not so different that any one of us ceases to be human.

None of us is alone in our uniqueness.

Nor are we alone in our oddness.

And I believe we can allow ourselves to be seen by one another.

Uncertain.

Curious.

And then there is this world of ours.

A world that contains within itself countless other realities and countless smaller worlds—from the kilometre-wide fungal networks hidden beneath our feet to the distant galaxies whose light will only reach us long after we are gone.

Our universe is expanding without end.

And we are nothing more than a tiny blue dot somewhere in the middle of it.

How could we ever believe we truly understand any of it?

Music, too, is its own glittering universe.

It has the power to shape our consciousness.

It can calm us, delight us, inspire us to act.

It can bring people together.

It is bringing us together today.

It can express emotions of extraordinary complexity—grief, longing, or pure joy.

Perhaps music is one of the very few miracles capable of transcending the limits of language, granting us access to another world without requiring a single word.

That is why I said beforehand:

Listening to Bach is like talking to children.

If you never do it, an entire world will pass you by.

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The fact that there are still so many worlds I have yet to discover fills me with hope.

Because even within the worlds I already know, I find beauty everywhere.

In the crowns of magnificent trees.

In children’s chalk drawings on concrete.

In the loud laughter of my friends somewhere in the middle of the night.

I love beauty.

To me, it is the highest good.

And it is also my favourite form of protest.

To keep seeing beauty in a world that constantly reveals its darker side—to choose to focus on that beauty—is my way of protesting against hopelessness.

And I don’t want to notice beauty only after I have experienced suffering.

I want to keep my eyes open for it every single day.

And I think:

If there is already so much beauty in the worlds I know, then surely there must be infinitely more beauty waiting in all the worlds I have yet to discover.

If, one day, I can no longer see beauty in the world immediately around me, perhaps that is simply life inviting me to expand the boundaries of my own world once again.

One lifetime will never be enough for me to see everything beautiful there is to see, or to love everything there is to love.

We haven’t heard all of our favourite songs yet.

We haven’t met all the people we are going to love.

And nothing is more enduring than love.

With enough love, the fear of diving platforms becomes nothing more than a funny little anecdote.

With enough love, bridges can be built.

With enough love, no one needs to push another person aside.

With enough love, perhaps what seems wrong sometimes turns out to be right after all.

And with enough love, uncertainty always becomes curiosity.

So today I don’t simply wish you love.

I wish you three different kinds of love.

❤ A love that gives you words.

❤ A love that leaves you speechless.

❤ And a love that teaches you an entirely new language—in whatever form, or melody, that language may find you.