From A Distance

I’ve always been a big believer in travel and the benefits derived from leaving your comfort zone.

Not only can you be thrown into a whole new culture, along with the struggle to (hopefully) speak another country’s language and function within the rules and customs of a new country, but there is another benefit, which was brought home to me on a very recent trip to Edinburgh and London: you get a whole new perspective on your life at home.(The picture in this post is a Scottish egg hahaha.)

I had resisted visiting the UK for many years, thinking that it was too similar to home to provide a real change, or an immersion in a truly foreign culture. And yes, I did find many similarities of life in the UK to the United States, and I could see very clearly how so much of our cultural norms are derived from that heritage.

But on one major front, the differences between the UK and the US in 2018 were quite stark: the civility of everyday behavior. On this metric alone, the UK seemed like another planet compared to the US, and it was so refreshing to be in that space if only for one week’s time.

On a flight from Edinburgh to London, a young German PHD graduate in comparative psychology asked me why people in the US don’t want to spend money, or pay taxes, for the common good. I had no definitive answer for that, except to state that some Americans believe in “less government and low taxes.” And of course, there’s the “wild west” heritage of self-reliance to be factored in, too.

Unfortunately, this also translates into less services, and little benefits shared among the population. And it can cause some really embarrassing situations, like a four day school week in Oklahoma because money is not available for five days! It was interesting to discover that in Germany, university education is free to those who qualify, and universal health care is available, though not always at the highest standards.

I’m sure that free university education would be attractive to a wide swath of the American public too, if it could be funded. The idea that someone would leave college in the US with upwards of $200k in student loans is, from almost any perspective, outrageous and overly burdensome.

I also realized that as a visitor to the UK, I was spared the political schism  over Labour party scandals and the fallout from Brexit.

Ultimately, what travel provides is another perspective on ordinary life elsewhere, and a chance to see your own life from afar. If we take the best of what we experience and imagine it applied to our home country, travel becomes not just a pleasurable break from routine, but a home run on every other level, too.