This is difficult to explain. Imagine you live in Minnesota and it's a typical winter day, 15-20F, and you fly to Las Vegas for the weekend. You get off the plane, get to your hotel, ditch the coat and pants and don a light shirt and shorts, because it's 65F. Meanwhile the Nevada natives look at you like you're nuts and keep asking "aren't you cold?". Or you fly to Florida in April and bask in 80F and laugh at the guy wearing a down jacket. You know ... temperature acclimation. Then there's what I would call "topographical acclimation" i.e. it became weird to not see moutains on the horizons after living in Oregon for several years.
So imagine "psychic acclimation". You spend enough time in a place vastly different from what you're used to, such that it changes your perspective from which you view the people and places around you. I've experienced this shift a couple times in my life - like when moving to Norway (or back), or settling down in Oregon. These changes were slow and subtle. My travels within the US don't usually last long enough or put me into a vastly different environment to trigger any sort of psychic acclimation.
Yet my trip to Indonesia did, and I didn't realize it until I was on the plane to Amsterdam and reinforced in the Schipol airport. My very first inkling that I was looking at people differently was very superficial ... people just didn't look "right". They were pasty, wrinkly, unhappy. They looked unhealthy and most were overweight. They didn't fit into their environment (Europeans in Amsterdam, remember!). Or their seats. When I arrived in Minneapolis and walked through the airport, these impressions where magnified further.
How are Indonesians different? They're happy, helpful, generous. They have bright smiles where westerners have scowls. They respond positively to nearly every interaction - even when we have no common language and have to find someone to translate (or just persevere). When I ask questions about something that I see, they're more than happy to share an answer, and never seem bothered. Maybe they're really good at faking it and I don't know them enough to detect that - to me they were genuine.
This is so very different than interacting with Norwegians whenever I'm back in the "old country". They'll complain about something the US is doing and expect me to defend our policies, as if because I live in the US I must therefore endorse the support of Isreal, explain why Florida is so crappy and why Americans wear baseball caps and tennis shoes and are so fat. By contrast, the Indonesian's would rather ask questions about the US, our people, the way we view the world. They want to visit. They don't view the US as a competitor, but as a partner.
This experience has been sort of brewing in the back of my head until I decided to sit down and put it into my blog here. If you're an engineer you know simply explaining something to a brick wall (or me, if it makes any difference) forces us to describe, analyze, organize and classify in different ways which is often all we need to loosen a mental knot and solve the problem at hand - or understand what we are seeing and experiencing. And that's what I'm doing now. Even if you get nothing from my blog, or this post in particular, I'm figuring out stuff about myself. I may not even publish this introspection.
Having realized that the people and environment I'm seeing haven't changed, it must be that I have changed ever so little. The way I was seeing things was a reflection back upon my impressions of Indonesia, the people and their culture; an impression that wasn't readily apparent while I was there. I'm not talking about some oriental mysticism baffling an occidental traveler (I'm still agnostic and sceptical of non-observable claims of spirituality) - I hope I'm not THAT cliche'd.
I'm not even sure what I've figured out yet. I think all I can say is that, somehow, the warmth and generosity of the Indonesian's have left some sort of (hopefully) lasting impression on me.
Enough psycho-babble .. time to get outside and enjoy the sun.
No comments:
Post a Comment