cultural comforts: becoming part of a new place

“She asked if I had any desire to come back… and I explained that for me, my feelings about the country can be paralleled with my experience in Bangladesh: it may not be a place I completely understand or want to live in, but having spent a prolonged period of time there makes it feel in some senses like home.” (p.416)

In my ‘no place like home‘ blog entry, I talk about Toronto no longer being a place I could live, despite having friends and memories there. Yet at the same time, the multicultural elements of the city are something that I continue to praise and appreciate as I live in very different societies, with different levels of toleration, acceptance and understanding.

Toronto and Canada are a big part of my personal heritage. And as I live in other parts of the world, understanding new social systems and customs, eating habits, mannerisms, languages and ways of thinking, I become familiar and somewhat comfortable with certain aspects of them too. So when I meet a Cameroonian who has left home, for example, we can share a conversation and connection about the culture there, and feel comfortable talking with each other, in the same way I may feel talking to a Canadian about some aspect of Canadian culture; if I smell Indian food cooking, or hear someone speaking with an Argentinian accent, I automatically smile and want to interact with these familiarities. When we spend enough time in a place and are open to interacting with our surroundings (rather than living in our own cultural bubble, as many people choose to do), that place and people become part of our personal heritage too.

With time, one familiar culture does not override another; they coexist next to each other, making it easier to adapt to similar cultures and environments when we connect the links and similarities between places, rather than becoming shocked by their differences. And these cultural layers also help us to be less judgmental when we find yet another way of living in another place (by contrast, I hear tourists and expats all the time passing through or living in places, complaining about the lack of perceived organization and speed, for example, while others are unable to cope with the same place’s perceived obsession with organization and time). As we accumulate comfort levels with different ways of living, we start to ask why things are done a certain way, before assuming we know the ‘right’ way that things should be done, thought, or talked about.

As of this moment, I can proudly say that I’m part Anglo-Canadian, Franco-Canadian, Cameroonian, Bangladeshi, Indian, Japanese, Argentinian, and Namibian, at the very least. As with Canada, I may not want to live in many of these places, but I cannot deny my attachment and attraction to elements of them. And I do believe that by having a clearer understanding of what I like and like less about the places and cultures I’m connected with, I’ll find it much easier to recognize and settle in a compatible place as a more open person, when I’m ready to start the next phase of my work/travel/life cycle.