I have seen the extent to which the world has moved ahead without me. A colleague leads me, bewildered behind her, down endless streets of enormous, stately buildings and down the direction-defying lefts, rights, ups, downs of the city metro system – just deciding which way to walk is a challenge. I learned, at least well enough to do it all by myself later, but of course feigning to everyone around me that I knew exactly what I was doing.
All the cell phones, all the apps, the ability to look at a map, check an email, find a restaurant’s address and ratings, look up a book to find it in the bookstore you’re in, even use your phone in place of a boarding pass for a flight… it’s all so convenient but makes me feel so uneasy! It feels as though the world has moved on and left me behind it, lost in the bustle and buzz of a city at work.
I see store window after store window of sleek, well-crafted clothes the likes of which I haven’t seen in a few years, sturdy-looking and chic shoes that probably wouldn’t fall apart on me in a few months, oodles of “Food Court” setups (with not a single restaurant chain name I recognize) in what seems like every office or state building complex I pass, and I wonder if I will ever be the kind of city person who patronizes those kinds of places, is that kind of consumer… do I want to be?
And everything can painlessly be paid for with a quick swipe of a credit card, and nothing more, no need to bother tallying up your totals if you don’t wish to – that’s what the bank statements are for. And this is only if one bothers with a card; many use their phones for that too. As for me, I haven’t used my credit card for anything but buying plane tickets online in the last three years; the ease with which people at the cash register swipe, hand it back, and smile at the next person with a “Can I help you?” makes me uneasy, like Aren’t we missing something still? Aren’t transactions usually more than that? Perhaps I’m too accustomed to barter systems.
I am left feeling like a child, naïve to these sophisticated, “first-world” city ways. I am awkward, get easily confused, concentrate hard on learning, and make mistakes often.
But I would like to see one of those who would scoff at my ignorance, in an attempt to navigate the Guatemala bus system. In that arena, I am expertly aware of where I must go to get on and what I must do when, to get off; the kind of transaction I can anticipate; strategies to employ to ensure paying a fair price; and especially on the alert for anomalies that could lead to unforeseen situations to handle. Your iPhone and credit card can make purchases black-and-white for you, but I’ve seen the amazement in other people’s faces as I employ all the tactics to negotiate shades of gray, to for example talk down a market vender to a price we can both agree on, which would have seemed impossible given her original price quote. Your earbuds plugging your auditory canals have precluded any need to socialize more than necessary with anyone you’d rather not talk to, but you wouldn’t know the first thing to say to get your neighbors (or potential renters) to trust you, like you, welcome you, and have reason to always treat you fairly. I’m always itching to show people my world. I’m sort of proud of how skillfully I navigate it, no matter how stone-age it may seem.
Are these skills useful? Arguably, outside of this developing-world, informal rural economy, no. But neither do the skills employed by every technobot (oops, I mean person…) walking down a D.C. street, seem difficult to acquire. That kind of complexity is accessible – if you wanted, you could read or download a manual for most of that, or buy a “(Fill in the blank) for Dummies” book on it. The rural kind of complexity is more about layers of understanding, hierarchy, and trust gained through experience and a keen memory, or good mental note-taking. May not be terribly useful beyond this context, surely this learning curve adaptability could be applicable to other contexts.
So it is that I come to realize, we all live in our own jungles – seemingly inexplicable messes that, upon examination, have an order and a rhythm. There are always, always layers of nuance and complexity that outsiders aren’t going to understand at first; we humans create that complexity through varying degrees of hierarchy and social mobility, I suppose whether it be Wall Street or a prison or an aboriginal tribe. I think this is what we call culture, never easy to adapt from one to another.
Today my taxi-driver caused me to reflect on this fact. His English was an African English, not an African-American English, and I so wanted to ask him where he was from (like, what country). But, thinking back to how much that question bothers me as a non-native to Guatemala (and how, yes, it’s probably a little accent that provokes the question), and not wishing to sound like a xenophobic upper-class yuppy by asking him and implying that he must not belong here, I held my tongue. I couldn’t think then of a decent way of asking, but now I wish I had said something like, Your accent is that of an educated African… Where are you from, what compelled you to leave, and why in the world are you just driving a taxi?? It seems he must have left his culture, his social landscape where he knew all the ins and outs, and came here and had to learn a whole new set – worse, with the odds stacked against him as a black man and as an immigrant. I reflect on all the things he could probably show someone about both of those worlds in which he’s learned to operate.
With time and the right proactive attitude, we can probably all learn to deal with and to function in any unfamiliar environment. But I’m beginning to reflect on whether or not it’s really beneficial to keep requiring that of ourselves. How many adjustments to new “jungles” will the average human being make in a lifetime in today’s world? And to what degree? Surely the adaptation from a high school experience to moving to college, is not the same magnitude of change as a move from an African village to Washington D.C.
But what concerns me most is the feeling that this requirement to adapt to “culture shock” if we can call it that, is no longer implied only by a geographic move; I get the sense that the modernized world is moving toward a constant state of adaptation to our own constantly-changing culture. There is always far too much for me to catch up on every time I visit the U.S., that at this point it’s simply overwhelming, and I no longer even really try. Will I always feel like a Neanderthal, even in my own country, even with the latest gizmos, even with the latest apps, even with the most recent 9.0 version of street-smarts? This is why I come away from a lovely little visit to the big city… feeling a little intimidated already about the next time I’ll have to go back! :)
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