There is something very grown up and scary and liberating about the practice of putting yourself in a position where you are an absolute beginner.

Of course as in: take a course in any skill you don’t yet master.

And there is something similar yet something completely different when you do that same thing in a cultural context, that is: when you put yourself in a position of a newcomer in a cultural or social context that you’re not familiar with. Suddenly you find yourself not knowing how your behavior affects others, how others perceive you.

You don’t know if what you say will be taken as a joke or an insult.

You don’t know at what speed to eat your food, or who starts.

You don’t know the proper ways to greet friends or colleagues or family members or strangers.

You might not even know the proper way to wash dishes or the proper way to use the toilet.

All of this puts you in a very vulnerable position.

You become a baby; babies have no culture. Babies are patently taught this throughout their whole process of growing up in all parts around the world.

You might make all the mistakes of a newcomer, acting rudely without even knowing about it; in Mozambique I used to smell the food I was served before eating it, enjoying my re-gained sense of smell I had lost to covid, not knowig for a long time that smelling your food before eating it was considered horribly rude.

It is a chock to realize that you have absolutely no idea how you are being perceived.

And you can only lean on the other and hope that they have the space in them to receive you generously, to give you the space to fail, to trust that you have good intentions even though what you are doing might, to them, be wrong.

Hoping that they will receive you as if you were a baby, just learning, trying and exploring.

And there is something very profound, humbling and softening, I find, in going through that process as an adult. You adapt the curious, unknowing gaze of a baby and suddenly, your horizons grow bigger. Your frames of reference change and you find that within you grows a space where you can receive people in new ways. You might start to perceive people’s actions to not necessarily reflect their nature, but just their culture. You fall into people and you let others fall into you, assuming they also mean no harm.

In this mesh of meetings, we are all just learning.

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(This story told in pictures.)