The Challenge, Opportunity, and Practice

The other day, I gave a small desk to a friend. She and I carried the desk down our street to her car. It wasn't that heavy, but it was awkward. The street where her car was parked was narrow and crowded. She carried her end of the desk behind her, I was in the rear. As we jostled along on the narrow sidewalk, we passed a woman coming toward us.

I expected the woman to make way for us, since we were, obviously, I thought, carrying something awkward and less in a position to yield than she was. But she didn't make way at all. Somehow we moved forward and she moved in her direction. "How rude," I thought.

The challenge--and opportunity--I find living in Mexico is that it is so easy to immediately blame her response on being Mexican, and to create a whole story around it. "Mexicans this... Mexicans that... It's so weird how Mexicans... You know how in Mexico, people..." And so on.

Maybe her response was "Mexican."

Or maybe it was a host of other possibilities. Maybe her mind was off thinking about her child's autism, or her husband's affair, or her mom's diabetes--or just her grocery list.

Maybe she had insecure footing and didn't like to step off sidewalks without a lot of careful forethought.

Maybe she had vision problems.

Who knows?

What I do know is, if this happened in the States, I would not think, "Oh, how American of her!"

When something I don't like happens in Mexico, it's very tempting to blame it on Mexico. It's a knee-jerk reaction for me to make as a foreigner always bumping up against cultural questions.

I see it as a challenge, an opportunity, and an ongoing practice to notice the places where my mind can go.