Familiarity

One of the best parts of taking the slow(er) way to get somewhere is the time it offers for reflection and contemplation.

I could have taken a 36 minute fast train instead of a 7hr bike ride, and I don't for a moment regret that I didn't take the 5-day walk solution.

"This Looks Like" is a game that my brain loves to play. Trying valiantly to assign a somewhere-else to wherever I am.

Today as I e-cycled along a narrow rural road with signs in a very foreign language, looking at fields of sunflowers so ripe that their heads have drooped to face the dirt instead of the sky, and corn, and apple orchards... All laid out in what makes sense to local custom....

I found myself playing: This looks like.....

No.
It doesn't. I've never seen fields of sunflowers this mature. While I did recently see many fields in Spain; the layout, the type, the corn, the apple orchards, the irrigation... Is all different. The dirt is a grayer brown instead of the red clay of the meseta and the colors entirely change with the August sun at 45° N latitude vs 42° in late June. I'm on a bike at ~25km/h not strolling at 5km/h. The smells of the cars' fuel (the presence of cars!), the roads, the humidity, the birdcalls... All of it. Nearly every damn thing is actually significantly different from anywhere and anywhen that I've experienced.

Which is part of what makes travel so fucking cool, no?

But despite all the evidence of dissimilarity, I find my brain trying to put this oblong peg into a round hole.

Why?

I think it's because us thinking apes have enjoyed tremendous evolutionary success by recognizing patterns. When we see an apple we see the idea of an edible fruit. It may be flatter or taller or redder or greener or larger or smaller... We don't bog down on those details. We see "apple" and know it is food, and we eat.

An unwanted side effect is that many of us have learned to grab things and arrange them in a snap-to-grid fashion. We ignore the differences, which are often the true beauty of a thing.

As I pedaled, I wondered in what other arenas I make this mistake? Where do I let prejudice slip its insidious claws into my appreciation of people, places, food, experiences?

I suspect I do it far more than I think and I'm going to pay closer attention. Seeing every single difference, every single time would drive a man mad; that isn't what I advocate.

Paying attention to what is actually present is so much richer an experience than is pretending that things *entirely* match a pattern previously learned.

But my lunch is here and I'm going to see how different it is than the almost-the-same description in Croatia.... Other than being double the portion size!Read more