Learning along the way

I borrow this line from the subtitle of cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson's book, Peripheral Visions: Learning along the way, mainly because at this point in my thinking about this new transition in our lives, parts of her work kept coming to mind. She writes about the experiences of "familiarity" and "strangeness" across cultural contexts and what educational aspects emerge in these transitions and intersections, bringing us closer to what we thought foreign, and offering a more detached analysis towards what we took for granted as familiar.

“What we call familiar is built up in layers to a structure known so deeply that it is taken for granted and virtually impossible to observe without the help of contrast. Encountering familiar issues in a strange setting is like returning on a second circuit of a Mobius strip and coming to the experience from the opposite side. Seen from a contrasting point of view or seen suddenly through the eyes of an outsider, one’s own familiar patterns can become accessible to choice and criticism. With yet another return, what seemed radically different is revealed as part of a common space.”

Mary Catherine Bateson. 1994. Peripheral Visions. p. 31

The idea of the passage, of the possibility to transition multiple times through learning experiences--and sometimes through the same ones, but from a different stand point--seems very relevant to our current situations: a move to a different country, moves into new career directions, new understandings of ourselves and of each other as a family... Of course, the passage is not meant to be used, over and over, as a tired metaphor, but simply as an anchor--a reminder of what these experiences of transition are meant to be: passages to better understanding (and, hopefully, better "doing").