One of the most important and helpful skills my students have is when they learn to parse out their own experience and behaviors from experience and culture vs. a biological response.
When they do this- compassion and insight grows 💜.
I am the youngest of 4, from an Irish Catholic family in the northeast of the USA. It influenced me…
I find certain kinds of biting humor funny. Under threat, I would rather fight than flee. That was all learned and influenced by the place I was born and the family I was born into.
But do I like to fight? No. Who does?
Biologically speaking all of us would rather get along with our group than fight. Fighting takes a lot of energy after all.
I have been parenting as long as I have lived in the southeastern countryside with my husband. I have been in a carpool with other families for 17 years! Thankfully we are in our final stretch before both of our kids will be in school close to home, where a bus is available. A few weeks back, I got into a conflict with another carpool parent. Essentially my way of communicating and this person’s way of communicating were dramatically different – so it landed with each of us differently than it would a person from our hometown.
East Coast vs. West Coast? Yes.
When we talked, it was clear there was no point in jumping to conclusions and evaluating what we had said from a cultural perspective alone. In the northeast, we lean into conflict as a way forward. On the west coast – conflict is not handled that way at all. Thankfully, the other parent and I have lived on both coasts and had some understanding of the other’s culture and way of communicating. It helped us find a way forward.
Most aspects of relating are culturally taught and expressed. Yet, we place an insane amount of value clinging to our way or rejecting it as ‘bad’. All the conflict this causes seems insane to me when you consider that all aspects of our experience are born out of a specific time and place. They are born out of history, law, economy, etc.
If you watch the World Cup, you would see how, for example, the Brazilians play a very different style of game than the Japanese. They are all playing the ‘same’ game, but each is playing it under culturally learned influences. They not only move differently, but they place different values on playing a more individualistic vs. collective game too.
I always love an underdog. I feel particularly drawn to the story of Lionel Messi. Not your typical underdog, Lionel Messi is arguably the best player the sport has seen. When he was 13 years old and there was political upheaval in Argentina, he moved with his father to Spain to play for a team in Barcelona Spain. Like many immigrant families, he and his father forewent living with the whole family, to pursue the possibility of a better life for the entire family.
When he arrived in Spain, he played an Argentinian style – more individualistic with less emphasis on a passing game. The Spanish coaches slowly taught him how to play their style – an aristocratic style that included more emphasis on the team.
When the Spanish national team asked Lionel Messi to join, he refused. 💜 His heart wanted to always go back to Argentina and to play for his homeland.
When he did return to Argentina and began to play for their national team, he was still a young man. While he was a standout with skills, nobody really knew him or understood where he had come from. Everyone wondered who this guy was? What neighborhood was he from? Anytime he messed up the fans would say things like ‘he isn’t really Argentinian’ or “ He isn’t really from here. He left us for Spain.”
Now the Argentinian coaches took their turn – they said he had to stop playing like a snob and play tougher, play like a tough individual who wins at all costs. Everything he had learned not to do while playing in Spain.
The outcome? Messi may be the world’s best player because he knows how to play both ways.
Most immigrants can relate to this – a sense of not belonging exactly anywhere or being a mix of cultures with a foot in each world. Even those of us who are not immigrants, but have just moved to different parts of the country where the culture is completely different from the one we grew up in can relate in some ways.
Where I live now people don’t talk like me, they don’t fight the way I do, they don’t dance the way I do, and they certainly don’t express themselves the way that I was taught to express myself. I have learned and adapted to make things work. We all do this.
When we travel to another country, if we are good travelers, we try to respectfully observe, learn, and adapt. We all know those travelers who just want every place to be like home – we look at them and wonder why they left home?
On a recent trip up north, to see our family, my youngest son said to me “I just think people in Pennsylvania are more fun.” When I asked him what he meant, he couldn’t really explain it. I tried to explain to him that because I’m his mom and I’m from the north, I express fun in a particular way, or I think certain things are fun. Since he’s grown up around me and because of the things I choose, it is familiar to him. Of course the people where we live are fun and have fun- it’s just expressed differently.
When I’m at a wedding here in the south, I often have to reel myself in not to dance as wild as I would at the weddings, I grew up dancing at. I recently went to a wedding in my neighborhood where a bunch of the cousins attending were from the northeast like me. When I walked in and I saw people moving and dancing like me, it was such a relief because I could join them and be as wild as they were without being alone. It felt so good to join the group and let down my hair for a few hours.
I will be rooting for Lionel Messi because the man just wants to win and be accepted by his country, his home, and his people. I hope that even if they don’t win, he comes to some sense of peace. Isn’t that what we all want? To be loved and accepted by our group and to get to be who we are at the same time? We don’t want to forego expressing something that is true to us to be in the group, but at the same time we certainly don’t need to share everything in common in order to be part of the group.
At Thanksgiving there was no need for my family and I to discuss politics. We know we disagree. Yet, even though we don’t agree on what the problems our country faces let alone the solutions, we still love each other, we still belong to each other. We are still connected, we are still a group with a shared history, and we are still in a relationship.
I will always feel more at ease in the northeast. And I love my community here. One is not better. I know we must dig sometimes, but we can all find something that is common to us. We are all humans after all;-)
Peace,
Astra
