Culture

Living in another country is a healthy experience. Everyone should have the opportunity to do so for a shorter or longer period of time. Ostensibly it is beneficial to widen your horizons and to realise that the world is bigger than the small territory that you have set your sights on up to now. In fact, contrary to expectations, self-knowledge may be the more important outcome of a confrontation with another culture. If everything goes well, you may discover that much of what you considered as natural and a matter of course is not that at all. It is plain home-grown culture, just one local way of looking at things and experiencing the world, but not the only way possible and certainly not the only logical way.
What we have learned by living together, even as three Western Europeans, is that we have to be careful in assuming that logic is on our side. Just take the example of language. English is a notorious language for pronunciation and spelling. All logic seems to be absent: you don’t pronounce words consistently in the way that they are written and you don’t write them in the way that they are pronounced. For a foreigner it is quite a bewildering experience.
It would be wrong, however, to conclude smugly that your own language, Flemish and Dutch in the case of Mark and myself, is the more logical means of communication. Such a conclusion is based on a false comparison: by taking inconsistencies in the English language and putting them over against cases of consistency in your own language.
Self-knowledge is to be gained when you dare to search for inconsistencies that are part of your own language as well. The only thing that is needed is honesty and you surely don’t have to search very far.
It may seem unsettling at first, your nice self-image gets a bit dented. But what is really happening is that you arrive at a commonality of inconsistency, a togetherness in accepting that our different languages, written and spoken, are just inadequate ways of expression. They don’t tell the whole story.
Ideally, this awareness becomes a source for a common search for meaning. As long as we acknowledge that no one has the full story, the basis is there to look together for the missing parts.

Ton