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Living on the Edge and
On the Road with a Family
Life’s rhythms take new form when you disrupt the natural order of your biosphere.
… moving hemispheres, changing jobs, changing towns and languages. Then there are the religious predispositions of a culture, which create more subtle tonal influences as well.
What does it mean to become part of another culture and how long does that really take?
Many years ago, I became especially intrigued by this question while reading Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a thousand faces. The book takes you across the world, looking at many symbolic mythological characters and connecting dots between each continent and time period all for the sake of developing a larger perspective on the human experience. He especially drew my attention to the cultural radio waves, as he put it. He explained that there are many unspoken rhythms and expectations within each culture, and a visitor may merely glimpse notions of this. The Buddhist, Islamic, Catholic, Hindu, and the indigenous cultures all vibrate different value systems. I wanted to know first hand exactly what he meant.
While my husband had the good fortune of having lived for 3 years each in England and Japan, living in Vietnam was my first real taste of absorbing another culture.
