The lassitude hung onto my movement more than my own shadow...was it real or self-contrived. Most certainly it was fueled by my thoughts.. Pressure on every end and walking on egg shells.
The past year was a truer understanding of the Vietnamese culture and acceptance of it. It is actually the frustrations which pushed to a realization more fruitful than I expected. Oh I fucked up repeatedly along the way, but each fuckery was a mirror back into myself.
I began to pity myself at times; what a disgrace. Why pity the master for their own creation?
Sure, there was a multitude of factors outside my own actions which pressurized an already inflexible position...
However, it was my own inflexibility in thought, my own demented determination which caused the most headaches.
I've always said the causation for the insipid lifestyle was the eagerness to learn about the cultures, and more so, the people that constituted it. And so, I have. I have learned Vietnamese culture to a new degree...
As with everything, it begins with viewing the pretty face which agrees with everything held in one's own personal belief system. Identifying through similarly. Eventually, situations present themselves which display rather disagreeable quirks. Disagreeable due to having spent 30 years in a different mindset, and then deciding whether the quirks outweigh the awe one holds.
Are the quirks wrong. Not the least bit. Only different.
The pressure of adjusting not to the definitive points of the culture, but noticing the unspoken characteristics of it.
The unsaid which is like a slowly loading image. Enough negatives need to occur for an accurate portrayal to come through.
What did I gain? An insight into how it is not my perspective which is ideal, rather how I, like everyone, am a biproduct of the cultural environment I've spent my life in. And noted, I am a creation of a wider degree of influence, yet all these little pieces do not make me more right than another in the choosing of a life mantra.
I've learned, in this year more than any other, the true meaning of cultural awareness. For knowing about food, music, a few customs means as much as knowing what's in fashion.
Perhaps interesting, but overall mostly useless.
To have an understanding glimpse into the brain process surrounding such cultural customs and norms is where true awareness begins to emerge. It is too often we pick up on the superficial behavioural understanding, but fail to comprehend the deep rooted mentality associated with overall characteristics in behaviour.
At some point, acknowledge it is impossible to merge in completely because I do not think in the same pattern... Nor would I particularly want to, but still respect the way of life and feel privileged to be emersed in it...even the uncomfortable.
A rather invisible, yet completely absorbable line which one is intended to walk. Acceptance and belonging vs. staying true to on self. Deciding which personal behaviours can be altered in order to be harmonious, yet without feeling the dissidence of straying to far from one's own moral structure. Is belonging worth it, to feel lost from oneself? Never. At least not from my perspective.
On the contrary, to be inflexible would be to take such differences as victimisation...
Absolute bullocks.
Yes, I praise individualism.. but I am in awe of collectivism. To an extreme, both are detrimentally flawed.
I am still in awe.
In awe of a country, and its people, regardless of how much my own way disagrees with certain customs.
And finally, it should be noted, the Great divide...I am sitting from an observatory state. I am not fluent in Vietnamese. How different would the experience be? Would as much have been observed? Or, would the foolish curtain of language have blinded me from the observations which can only be made as a true outsider?
