It had only been a few days since we three siblings sat by Larry’s bedside as he fought the last rounds of his fight against liver failure. And now we stood in the hot Texas sun at our brother’s funeral at the Plano Municipal Cemetery, only steps away from the burial plots of our mother and father, both buried less than five years earlier.
Larry was a year younger than I but looked years older, both from the ravages of the disease and a 50-year life lived hard. A few months earlier, when he was weak but still lucid, I travelled back from Europe to spend some time with him before the imminent end. We sat talking for several days in the small frame house in the country where we were reared. There was a palpable awkwardness as we struggled to make casual conversation, with an elephant in the room being that we’d had very little meaningful contact over the past 25 years. But the mood relaxed during the times when we would reminisce, looking out the window over the pecan orchards of our former ranch, down to the creek and woods where years ago we hiked and fished and camped, and to the fields where we chopped weeds and baled hay. Much of this was in the mind’s eye of our memories, for now the former home place was bisected by a six-lane street and dotted with columned mansions, a community college, and a megachurch.
In some ways, Larry’s was not your typical funeral. For one thing, we laid him to rest in a casket spray painted in camouflage and covered not with flowers but with an arrangement of cattails, fishing net and a duck decoy. The paint job was the creative inspiration of my older brother and younger sister, who deemed it a fitting tribute to our avid hunter/fisherman brother but which no doubt led to some interesting conversations around the coffee machine at the Ted Dickey Funeral Home.
There in the funeral crowd stood Mr. Green, my high school history teacher, as well as Mr. Millender, my junior high football coach/geography teacher. (In those days, a standard combination). And there was my seventh grade science teacher/third cousin Lester (or as I was instructed to call him back then, Mr. Prince). There were various relatives and several high school acquaintances, many of whom had never moved away and seemed stuck in a time warp. I hadn’t seen some of these people since LBJ was President, but they greeted me as if we had just talked at our lockers after math class. (“Man, it’s good to see you, Donny! How have you been? Hey, remember that Boy Scout campout where we put that can of chili in Tim’s sleeping bag?”)
Back in the hometown I left 35 years ago, I took a look in the mirror, and my roots were showing.
Like most of us, there is much of my past that I embrace and some memories that are less than fond. My parents were urbanites who in 1954 decided to move from the city to the country, so I grew up with a foot in both camps. This urban/rural dichotomy was part of my early years. My grandfather was a CPA in a big accounting firm in the city, but he had an illiterate brother who lived down the road from us in a small house with no indoor plumbing. I spent hours fishing on the creek bank but also had opportunities to attend the theatre and classical concerts in nearby Dallas throughout high school.
There is much I appreciate and miss about my younger years, but when the time came to physically and emotionally leave home, it was not a difficult decision. And my life since has been a journey of expanding horizons. In college and with every subsequent career move, my involvement with the world has broadened. Long before moving to Europe, I was involved and interacting with people from around the globe. Before relocating to Belgium, I had travelled to other countries over 80 times. Now I have lived overseas three times for 14 years. The cumulative effect has been the development of an increasingly global mindset and a greater cultural awareness, but here’s the thing: It is built upon the foundation of my own cultural roots.
This is a key intercultural paradox: In order to accept, understand and adapt to other cultures, a necessary first step is to understand and embrace your own cultural heritage and social identities. Why? Because your world view, values, behaviors, and perspectives are greatly shaped by the sum of your cultural influences and the social groups to which you belong. Being aware of “where you’re coming from” makes you more conscious of your biases, ethnocentricity, and reactions to different people.
So how does examining my cultural roots make me more interculturally aware and adaptable? In and of itself, it doesn’t. It’s only one key ingredient, but it’s a major first step.
When I am put in a situation or encounter that crosses culture or other differences, I am better able to do three things:
First, I can be in touch with my emotional reactions to differences. At times I may feel irritation, impatience, confusion, embarrassment, or any number of emotions when I encounter differences. It’s easier now to realize that hey, something’s messin’ with my Cultural Comfort Zone (See those Texas roots?) and react to the situation accordingly.
I can also be more aware of my tendency toward ethnocentrism. It’s natural to see the universe through my cultural lenses, but it becomes a problem if I unconsciously make negative judgments about everything that is different. Being conscious of my cultural conditioning makes it easier to say, “It’s different” rather than “It’s wrong or inferior.” This is not to say that the gut reactions totally disappear or that my picture is now included in the dictionary next to the definition of “patience”. When living in Brussels, it still bothered me when I arrived home to find someone parked in MY driveway, but not so much when I realize that I capitalized MY because of my cultural norms and values around privacy and property, which are different than those of my European neighbors. I still don’t like people cutting in line, but it helps me to be more patient when I am aware that I grew up with a different view of lines and orderliness. I can be more comfortable when someone violates my personal space, more tolerant of what feels like a blunt response, or even more open-minded when someone says something critical of my home culture.
And I can be more sensitive to how my behaviors and attitudes may hinder my effectiveness. The more I can examine my actions in light of the different culture I’m encountering, the more I begin to notice where my “typical” behaviors may at best lessen my effectiveness and at worst offend or alienate others. Certain things that are quite acceptable in my home culture may not be in other parts of the world. I can decide to just act the way I would back home, or I can opt to move out of my comfort zone and choose to behave in a culturally-appropriate way and thus relate more effectively.
Don’t misunderstand – cultural adaptability does not require you to be something you’re not or to abandon your heritage or identity. In fact, it is just the opposite – when you are true to yourself and have a clear view of your own identity, it frees you up to develop the perspectives, motivation, and skills needed to relate to just about anyone, anywhere.