Is it new, or is it you?

September 9, 2016

Moving to a new place is weird. Everything that is new to you is just part of the territory.

My first day in Alaska people were cutting me off over and over again. I thought: “This is new for me, Alaska is wild. People must drive like this because that’s the territory”. When I brought this up to a local at the store,  they told me: “That isn’t a quality of an Alaskan, that’s the quality of a jerk who’s in a hurry”.

Through the lens of the untrained beholder everything is accepted as a native part of the environment. Through that lens everything stands out, thus nothing stands out.

Whenever we learn something new, we try to recognize patterns to help us discern the normal from the abnormal. Through the eyes of a beginner there are no challenges, just uncharted territory. When it comes to our lives, we use everyone else’s life to build our patterns. We gage our position based on where we think everyone else is.

Our life is now familiar territory. Everything new that we face is something that WE have to “deal with”. “How could this happen to me?” and “My life sucks”  have become the anthem that we gladly sing any time we have the chance.

The alternative is to live as someone who has never experienced life before. That person could glide over the same territory the rest of us trudged through, unknowingly conquering that which was deemed impossible by everyone else.