Step into Discomfort

Move out of your comfort zone: Expand your social and idea network

My hands scramble at the book of Japanese cartoons that my son, Tomas, has brought home from the library. The cover is put on wrong. There must be some mistake!

Even after I remember that in manga, or Japanese comics, the story should be read from right to left, I stand there, bewildered.

My stomach lurches. The ground tilts at my feet. My heart beats a little faster. My sense of discomfort is visceral.

Now, my expectations about how the world should work have been overturned in more profound ways, both in daily life here in rural Oregon as part of a biracial, bilingual, mixed immigration status family, as well as in living and traveling in Argentina, Bolivia, Spain, and Italy.

Yet I am always humbled by how tightly we grip onto ideas about how things work and how people should act. Dangerously, we don’t even name them as ideas or opinions, but rather, “just how things are done,” or “the way things are,” if we name them explicitly at all.

Ideas can be about gender, parent-children relationships, our responsibility to others, and how authority figures should be respected/treated. Big stuff. The moral underpinnings of our lives.

More surprisingly to me, are the ideas that creep in disguised as everyday facts. Such as how warmly to dress children. Whether to salt rice when it is cooking, or to add flavor with food on top. How to plant tomatoes. In what…