The Gift of Travel

As I write we are all in the midst of a global crisis which I hope will be once in a lifetime experience. I’ve been living in lockdown as other millions of people for the last few weeks and, despite having worked out my coping strategies, I can’t avoid sometimes wandering away with my thoughts and find parallels between what is happening in these days and some of my experiences of the past.

Perhaps longing for travel, for something outside the perimeter of this house, today my thoughts went back to when I left Italy for the first time to move to the United States for work. I was 27 back then and I had never lived in another country till that point. The idea to go to another country for a two year project was incredibly exciting and it happened in a period of my life where I was looking for something new… and, blimey, didn’t I get it!

This period of crisis reminds me of a few aspects I had to awaken to when I embarked in my first international experience.

Accept

There isn’t a greater wish I would make to somebody than the wish of travelling as much as possible and, even more, have the chance to live in as many countries as possible. Especially if it is your first time, the thing I recommend the most is to learn to accept. Accept not only the new culture, no matter how close you think it is to the one you come from, but also that there will be differences that will throw you off-balance. My first time, I made the fatal mistake to assume that “the US must be pretty much identical to Italy in mentality, views and behaviours”. That couldn’t have been further from reality. And once faced with reality, I manned-up and I did what I do best: I bitched about it. But I was due to stay there for at least two years and I started suspecting that, even with two years at my disposal and my best bitching efforts, the US’s population was not going to adapt to me.

What happened next? The best thing that could happen to me happened: I surrendered. And this is my recommendation to you if you are thinking of going to live somewhere else: prepare to reconsider what you think you know about yourself and what you define as your identity because, most likely, you don’t fully know who or what you are. You see, being strongly rooted in a place is, in a way, a beautiful thing but limiting in some regards. Looking at yourself every day in the same mirror won’t show you anything new except maybe the passing of time. The only way we might learn something, and that’s not a given, is through the eyes of somebody different from us, different in language, traditions and culture, somebody that thinks, speaks, acts and feels differently from us. The only way is to look at ourselves from beyond that comforting mirror we, too often erroneously, mistake for our identity. Henry Miller, in relation to something different, wrote words that resound also for this subject:

“First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again as an individual”.

Henry V. Miller – Tropic of Capricorn

In these lockdown days I had the chance to get to know more people from the blogging galaxy out there. Some of the people I had the fortune to meet are from www.colture.co which is a blog dedicated to Colombia and Bogota’ in particular. Amongst the activities they promote and run for the community there is also a Spanish language school www.wheeinstitute.com which helps people from abroad and in Bogota’ to learn Spanish in an unconventional way mainly based on live interaction with teachers and other students. Talking to them about their activity we shared thoughts about the difficulties faced by people moving to a different country. Some of their students are “gringos” looking for Spanish classes when moving or right before moving to Bogota’ for study or work. One thing that people living that experience often underestimate, is the fact that a different language is not just a “mechanical” difference in grammar, vocabulary and logic construct but runs as deep as mentality, traditions and, at times, history of that culture. This particular thought is something I carry with me from my first time in USA and I wish I had a deeper insight into it before getting there, I believe I would have been much more open-minded than I believed I was.

Adapt

Back in the days of my experience in USA, after getting over the “acceptance” stage I was then faced with a new question: what do I do about it? In life, same as when travelling, we all prefer to think that we are in control of what’s going to happen to us, that we can decide what will come our way. It might be just me but my experience is that, at best, we can decide what to do about what life throws at us.

A bit like in this period we, our communities and businesses are adapting to a situation which is unprecedented but adapting doesn’t necessarily mean we are doing anything different, we are just doing the same things in a different way. Going back to my days in US, I remember that from day one I never had a problem meeting people. I was based in Southern California and there people are extremely friendly and it wouldn’t take more than 10 minutes sitting at a bar before somebody would come to have a chat. I welcomed that open approach especially because in Italy, in some cases, if you sit in a bar where nobody knows you, the chances of somebody coming and talking to you are quite slim. At the same time I had to learn quite quickly that the casual approach and the welcomed chat had a dimension which was not what I was used to. See, in Italy, if somebody eventually approaches you to talk, chances are, they are interested to get to know you as much as possible and, depending on how it goes, the boundary of the chat ranges unchained from totally casual to deeply personal; that is culturally normal for us. In SoCal this aspect is different. Especially at the beginning, I had the tendency to fall back onto the Italian way of chatting but that doesn’t really work in California. Probably out of sense of privacy or because, in general, Americans feel compelled to do something if they know about a perceived problem, they don’t really want to know too much about your problems or difficulties, at least at the beginning. In some cases their reaction felt like I was asking a favour by means of simply talking about how I was doing. Before this observation is mistaken for the shallow American/Californian cliché, let me say that this is where the differences I experienced between Americans/Californians an Italians end. What I learned is that takes them a bit longer to be comfortable with you, they prefer to get to know you a bit at the time and in a way they’ll trust you more based on what you do than on what you say and because of that it takes longer to establish a relationship where you can have deeper conversations. Is it right? Is it wrong? Is it better? Or is it worse? None of the above in my view… it just is different and the lesson here is to learn to adapt. Once more, if there is anything I would recommend, is that you try to leave your conventions where they belong and where they are mutually understood and accepted. Adapting, at least when travelling or moving to a different country, is synonymous with respect.

The parallel with this period is that the boundaries of our personal space, physical and emotional, are being redefined. Digitally and technologically never so close and, at the same time, physically never so distant, I see how, at least in the immediate future, expressions of friendship, love or affection will change. Based on my past experience I don’t doubt it will feel different but I can’t help thinking that there might be something new to learn from it and the paradigm of what “respect” means in these new spaces will shift, not in meaning but manifestation.

Grow

At the end of my first two years in the US I went back to Italy to continue my career with the company that trusted to send me there in the first place. By then I only knew two things: one was that I was going to quit my job and go back to the US to start my own business venture and continue my personal adventure, the other was that I was a different person from the one that left two years prior.

If that’s what you dream of, if that’s what you desire, I wish you to go as far as your motivation, ability and heart can take you but, for what is worth, let me tell you that you’ve got to come back to really know how far you have gone. Learning to accept and adapt to other cultures, traditions, languages and behaviours is a worthless exercise if it doesn’t help you to be more conscious of yourself. The gift of travel is a double-edge knife; on one side gives you the possibility to re-invent yourself as many times as you can manage and it can give you as many new prospective as you dare to accept but, on the other side, puts right in your face the dark and uncomfortable back of that mirror we define as ourself. If it is true that we see what we want to see then, the front of that mirror is the perfect tool to delude ourself that we know what we are made of but, if we look from beyond that mirror, we will see all the fears, discomfort, self-awareness, pre-conceptions and judgement we carry with us, no matter how far we think we went.

The gift of travel only comes to fruition if we learn to admit and deal with the uncomfortable truths about ourself without judging but with the sincere intent to improve.