Seeing Eye to Eye

    

When I was in my late teens, my mother informed me that she had gone to see a fortune teller, a man who lay on a bed amidst plumes of cigarette smoke and didn't look at her once.  He told her that she had two children; that her son would have two boys and that her daughter would travel. 

     Now, I have never held much store by foretellers of the future, but I have thought of this a few times over the years, especially given that I constantly dreamed of travelling as a child, and yearned to know what was beyond the furthest hills I could see from the valley where I lived.  And then my brother had two boys.....

 

'To travel is to dispel the mists of fable and clear the mind of prejudice, and facilitate perfectness of seeing eye to eye.'   Thomas Cook, from the 19th century.

      My father once said to me, long before I began my own travelling adventures, that 'everyone who can should travel, because it's the best way to see life from other perspectives, which changes the way you see your own.'  He wasn't wrong.  Not everyone has the opportunity, depending on what life throws at them, but I was lucky.  When I began my solo travels, aged twenty-six, some ten years after I had originally intended, I was pretty rigid in my thinking and beliefs, and filled with certainty about the validity of my own worldview.  This did not shift immediately, and may never have shifted at all had I stuck to traditional tourist travel, seeing 'the sights' and staying in hostels or hotels.  Instead, I must have intuitively understood that I needed to experience different countries and cultures from the 'inside out', so I joined Servas, a Quaker organisation which arose out of the laudable desire to foster world peace by living with locals in different cultures, in order to understand what life looked like from their perspective.  At that point it was word-of-mouth only, and I was interviewed by an 85 year old 'coodinator' in my home city in New Zealand, who, upon hearing I had 26 penfriends told me I would make a 'perfect Servas traveller' and immediately signed me off and gave me the address books I requested.

     'Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all people cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.' Mary Angelou
 

     My first country was Israel, and the first Servas family I ever stayed with were Jewish, in new Jerusalem.  I spent evenings sharing meals with them and discussing their beliefs and experiences, and my only regret is that I didn't stay with a Palestinian family also, although I was pleasantly surprised by the openness of the Jewish family and their overriding desire for peace and understanding on both sides of the historical divide.  After this, I lived with French, Danish, Swiss, Italian, Swedish, Austrian, Hungarian, Polish,  east and west German, Dutch, Canadian, American, and finally Russian families, the latter being just after Communism came to an end and which required letters of invitation and all kinds of bureaucratic hurdles to overcome before even setting foot in the country.  Then, not quite the same, but still illuminating, I stayed for 6 months in an international hostel with Brazilian, French, Bulgarian, Turkish and Spanish girls.  For one summer I taught English in Poland, and one autumn I lived in a French monastery on retreat.  I tried as hard as I could not to be a tourist, but to be a traveller, and to see the world from the myriad of perspectives of those I met and shared life with, however briefly.  I know that many others have travelled to far more exotic places and in far more interesting or novel ways than I ever did, but for me, it was just what I needed.  Gradually, incrementally, like water carving out stone, my own fixed opinions shifted and began to erode away.

     This makes it sound like it was effortless, this dissolving of an individual's mindset, and it certainly was not that.  I recall some months in a kind of psychological agony as I wrestled with the conflict between what I believed about how the world worked, and the direct contradictions I was faced with.   It took some years for my mindmade structures to collapse, and I remember the incredulity when this happened; it was as if I'd been living in a mental fortification all my life and now that the structure had crumbled, I could see so much further than I could before.  And yet I'd been so terrified as the mental mortar was crumbling around me, as if my very life was at stake! This didn't happen just once, but has occurred quite a few times, and I suspect it hasn't finished yet.  Whenever my  own views and opinions become hardened and immovable, it is time for the whole structure to be shaken to its core.  This is always uncomfortable, or painful, and sometimes terrifying, but I can't help thinking that it is a very good thing, and I hope I will always be brave enough to welcome it.

 

'Instead, let us collect life experiences that change who we are, and who we want to be,' writes Roman Krznaric, from The School of Life, in his article Capturing Life, not Landmarks.   Amen to that.