“Wake up. WAKE UP. Look at the mountain.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Look at the mountain.”

“…that’s a fire.”

“That’s three fires. Count them.”

“They did it? They actually did it?”

“They signed it this morning. My brother rode in an hour ago. He held the paper in his own hands.”

Somewhere below them, a woman is screaming something that is half a song.

“Never again. Never again, never again, never again.”

He doesn’t answer her.

He is standing barefoot on cold grass with his hands over his face, and he does not care who sees it.

“They’ll come back,” he says at last.

“Let them come. They come for you, they come for all of us.

That is what the paper says. That is the whole of what it says.”

Down in the square somebody starts hammering on a pot. Someone else finds a horn.

By morning every valley in the country knows, because every valley lit a fire for the next one.

That was 735 years ago tonight.

Three small mountain valleys had just promised to defend each other against an empire.

The country that grew out of that promise is called Switzerland.

Chocolate, cheese, mountains, or the banks

Say “Switzerland” to a stranger and you get one of four answers. Chocolate. Cheese. Mountains. Money.

Right?

Three of those I’ll happily claim.

The fourth one I have a complicated relationship with, and I trained as a financial advisor, so I’ve seen that world from the inside.

Which brings me to something I’ve never done in this letter before.

A money sponsor, once

Today’s email has a sponsor:

​Mode Mobile. They build smartphones that pay their users back for the attention they spend on them, and they are raising money from ordinary people at $0.50 a share under Reg A+.

Here is my problem with it.

I’m a Swiss man living in Romania. I can’t take part. So I’m not going to stand here and tell you I did.

What I will say is this.

If I were American, sitting on some spare money and looking at the idea that your phone should pay you instead of the other way round, I’d read the offering documents.

That’s the whole endorsement. I only put my name near things I use or would use, and this is the honest version of that.

Read it, ignore it, do your own homework.

Investing is risky and I’m not your advisor.

Back to the fires.

The fires are the part that survived

Tonight, all over Switzerland, people will walk up hills carrying wood. Farmers, teenagers, bankers, whole villages.

By ten o’clock you can stand in almost any valley and count fires on the ridgelines in every direction.

More than 800,000 Swiss live outside Switzerland now. I’m one of them.

We light the fires too. In gardens in Sydney, on rooftops in Toronto, in a field in Transylvania where the neighbours think we’ve finally lost it.

Sausages, a flag, someone butchering the second verse of the anthem because nobody actually knows it.

And I’ve watched what happens to the people who stop.

What most people do when they leave

They take one of two roads.

The first is nostalgia. The tradition becomes a photograph. Something you tell your kids about, in the past tense, once a year.

The story gets shorter every time you tell it.

The second is the clean break. You become a citizen of the world. You are above all that flag business. And for about ten years it feels like maturity.

Then you turn 55, and you notice you belong to nothing...

Doing it beats thinking about it

There’s a study I keep coming back to, published in PLOS ONE in 2021 by Sarah Charles, Robin Dunbar and colleagues, called United on Sunday. They compared religious rituals with secular ones.

Singing, moving together, eating together, standing in the same place at the same time for no productive reason.

And the results?

The secular rituals bonded people about as strongly as the religious ones. What made the difference was the doing. The synchrony, the shared act, the endorphins that follow.

Remembering a ritual does none of that. Your body was not there.

That is why the photograph version fails.

You can hold the memory of a fire for thirty years and it will never once warm you.

What a fire actually is

Those fires were never decoration.

Long before anyone put them on a tourism poster, a fire on high ground was how one valley told the next valley that something was happening.

One man on a cold ridge with a bundle of wood, and within an hour a whole country knew.

A tradition works the same way.

Repetition is the entire mechanism. Skip it three years running and it isn’t a tradition anymore, it’s a story.

In the FARMISH blueprint this sits in the Relationships corner. The violated natural principle is simple here:

"Belonging is maintained by repeated shared action."

Nothing else maintains it.

You can have 800 connections and nobody to call at midnight.

And it will feel like bad luck, when the truth is arithmetic.

Tonight

Find out what time the sun sets where you are. Light something. A fire pit, a grill, a candle on a windowsill if you live on the fourth floor and the landlord is watching.

Feed one other person while it burns.

You're probably not Swiss, so pick your own date.

The thing your grandmother did every year that nobody has done since she died.

Do that one. Put it in the calendar for next year before the fire goes out, because the version of you in eleven months will not remember.

Then watch what happens by the end of the week.

You’ll catch yourself telling someone about it. That’s the signal that it took.

The part I actually want you to keep

You don’t need to live in a place to belong to it.

You need to keep doing the thing.

735 years ago three valleys made a promise they had no realistic way of keeping.

Then they kept it anyway.

Badly and imperfectly, for seven centuries, mostly by showing up every year and lighting a fire where the next valley could see it.

Whatever you’ve let go dark.

It relights faster than you think.

Happy first of August, from a hill in Transylvania.

Your Swiss friend,

Daniel