Of Mice and Men

Moving to another culture will teach you many new things. It will start by teaching you things you never noticed about yourself that suddenly stand out in a foreign culture. Small diminutive mannerisms that don’t seem out of place until you take them into the abnormal.

The other thing it will teach you is the extent to which people around you affected your people communicate in many different ways, with many different underlying foundations to affect their worldview. While this has always been true in theory, it’s not until you experience it that it truly begins to shine through in a real way.

While being here in Fiji, I obviously interact with people from all over the world. Australians, Kiwi’s (New Zealanders), Americans, Fijians, Philippino’s, French, British etc. Every one of them holds different values and different ways to look at the world. Put them all into a room, and abruptly it’s like turning on the neon light. Oh, don’t worry, they all get along just fine, but as the night starts to draw on, different sides of them begin to emerge as they interact.

Many of you know that I love to sit back in a crowd and just watch what comes out in people. People do eccentric and comical things when they think that no one is watching, myself included! But a rare few do the weirdest things when they know that people are watching. It begins to show what really lies underneath. Do they think that they are superior to the people that are around them? Are they crass and uninhibited underneath that smile? Are the oblivious to what goes on around them? These questions are answered very swiftly over the course of a night. The fortress begins to come down.

So the question that I have to ask myself, and I think we all should is... what’s inside that fortress? Are you really ready for people to see it? Or are you trying to veil it for everything you’re worth. It’s a chilling thought, but a necessary one.