Does anyone have a better word to describe the most important force affecting how we live in the global world? If you do, please let me know. I hate the word “culture”, because honestly, my first reaction to it is like, meh, what does this word really mean? Of course, given my work, I have to use this word all the time, but every time I do, I feel like there MUST be a better word for such an important issue. Once when I was talking about why culture is so important to me, someone said, “Oh, I thought you meant art or the opera”. Really?
Precisely because the word allows for so much subjective interpretation, it has very little inherent meaning on its own, which is why I find that every time I use it, it falls short of what I really mean. As soon as the word leaves my lips, it’s like a balloon that just goes flat. That something so important should be described with such a feeble word is very disheartening, so if you’ve got a better word, please let me know. Because when I talk about culture, I mean to say I am talking about the most profound force in our world today.
Fundamentally, I believe that when we experience another culture, we are looking into another world filled with endless possibilities of what life CAN be like, what new possibilities are available for us, of new ways of thinking, being, living. I get excited just thinking about the idea that the way another culture deals with life may hold secret solutions to our own problems that we’ve simply not thought about. It blows my mind that my culture both creates and limits my ability to imagine how things COULD be. I get juiced seeing the same thing differently, after having learned how other cultures see it. Culture is a kind of magic eye that let’s us look at the world all over again, anew. It’s a chance, really, to be re-born.
I can’t imagine anything more important right now, for our world is seriously broken, and we need the imagination of all its people, embedded as it is in their respective cultures, if we’re going to fix it. Organizations and institutions must open up to alternate ways of being and thinking if they are to survive globally, and individuals living in today’s world must manage cultural encounters every waking moment of their day, with the courage to re-imagine each encounter as a gift of possibility and not an unwanted challenge. A gift this great really needs to be cherished, shared, and opened very carefully, with respect, wonder and humility. That’s why I think and talk about culture, and why I wish there were a better word for it all.
But it’s not the only reason. My work with culture has a personal, as well as professional, meaning for me. Hold on, I’m not talking destiny or kismet here, and I’m pretty sure that there is no pre-ordained purpose driving what I do and who I become. But there is a personal reason why I am so attached to this notion of culture, why I came to culture in the first place. Even before I realized how important it was for all of us, there was something about the word that was personally important for me.
I grew up in New York City, mid-century, Brooklyn. For me that meant my sister and I were working class kids growing up in a small apartment and going to public school while Mom and Dad did what they could - and that wasn’t always enough - to keep the days moving forward. My friends were other working class kids in our apartment building who came from everywhere else. Though my family was Jewish, my friends were Italian and Irish and Puerto Rican and Polish, and I remember the Monsignor from Holy Family Catholic Church on the corner visiting us in our apartment more frequently than some of my relatives. I couldn’t wait for Christmas, so I could join my friend Russ and his enormous family in their small apartment for Christmas Eve dinner, a staggering production of noise and colored lights, unbelievable aromas, and endless dishes of food, all served up after I should have well been in bed asleep. I learned to steer clear of the old Polish man who hung out at the entrance to our building and bothered all the kids with mysterious words and menacing looks every time we ran by. My soul was opened when I was invited to Donna Espinoza’s dazzling quinceanera, and my heart was broken when Maryann Kuryuoki came to me one day to tell me that her Japanese family was moving to New Jersey, and we held each other and wept. I grew up with the coruscating bedazzlement of the whole world whirling all around me.
But I was also one of those kids who had to learn to get by on their own. I wish I hadn’t have had to learn that lesson, but I guess I had to. I also wasn’t very good at sports, which added to my being more comfortable being on my own than depending on others. My grandfather, who lived in an apartment below us, would spend most of his days smoking a cigar in a big chair and watching the Brooklyn Dodgers or the New York Yankees on TV, and whenever I asked him to explain the game to me, he would give me the same answer that my Dad gave me when I asked him to explain Pinochle when he and his friends would gather for a game: “Shh, just watch.” In both cases, I never learned the game, but I learned how important it was not to depend on others and to get by on my own. So when the kids would come home from school and shout out to me to come on down and play stickball, I’d shout back, “Nah, I’ve got my maps, I’m OK”. I loved maps. I still do. I had a big world atlas, which showed the world in magical colors (at the time, mainly pink, representing the British Empire), an enormously heavy tome, like an oversized Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, which I would drag over to my bed, and slowly open, and then the whole wide world would burst out.
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