JANUARY 23, TUESDAY

LIVING IN A BUBBLE

It such a simple observation that it almost doesn’t seem worth mentioning. It is common sense. Cultures are very different. Everyone knows that. People in Sri Lanka speak Singhalese fluently. They wear slightly different clothing with the women mostly wearing loose blouses and wide skirts. The men often wearing lungis or clothing made for Sri Lankans and not the clothing made here for export to the West.

All the food except the sweets has some amount of chili in it with rice for every meal and curries often made of vegetables not available in Swannanoa. Rice flour is made into egg hoppers, an egg baked on a crust of rice flour in a hot metal bowl and also into a thin spaghetti woven into oblong balls, stringhoppers. Meat is cooked in small bite sized squares or balls in curries so that they are easy to eat by hand since no one uses utensils. Everyone washes their hands before eating since they are eating with their hands and afterwards to wash their hands clean.

And, of course the most basic difference, which I observed yesterday at the Maha Bodhi Temple is that most people in Sri Lanka are Buddhists living their lives in the presence of Buddhist belief and prayer. There is also a large Hindu population, a large Muslim population and a large Catholic population all living side by side but worshipping very different gods and living in another certainty about the meaning of life.

We all know this, that in the world there are thousands of communities speaking different languages, eating different foods, dressing differently and most of all living in very different religious realities.

What we somehow don’t seem to be fully accepting of is that whatever language or dialect we speak, what clothes we wear, what food we eat, and whom we worship and believe to be fundamental in our lives is just one of thousands of possibilities. In the world at large we are all minorities, living in our bubble of a community, which gives us identity and purpose but is only one of thousands of possible identities and purposes. We live in a relative world in which there is no correct way of doing things, no right culture.

Our own culture, our own bubble, binds us together and gives us identity. But feeling that our culture, our bubble, is right and the others are wrong tears us apart, polarizes us again and again.

What I have been feeling by being immersed in Sri Lankan culture for the last few days, eating only Sri Lankan food, being left out of most conversations, having trouble adjusting to the humid heat, not knowing the conventional way of doing many things is how much of a bubble, sealed off from the rest of the world, Sri Lankans, particularly villagers, live a red. I can see the bubble they live in because I am an outsider.

But what I realize again by being here is how much of a bubble the people of Swannanoa, me, live in. Their, our, language is one of thousands, we all eat the same bland chililess food, we all worship some variation of one god among thousands, we all find our identity in some notion of what it is to be American, often resisting and denying the interpretation of our neighbors. In fact we are these days intensely polarized about some of these things, each considering ourselves to be right.

What has been pushing itself on me for the last few days through being immersed in a culture so different from my own is how much of a bubble Sri Lankans live in, how much of a bubble Swannanoans live in, how much of a bubble I live in.

So the simple accepted assertion that I started with, that everyone knows that people in different cultures live differently, is much more complicated and much harder to accept if we are asked to consider how relative and no more right than any other culture our own narrow culture is, just one possibility among many.