Experiencing Double-Handed Differences

Why Traveling is a way to cross real differences

When I left France and went to the US for my studies, I immediately discovered why travel can have such a profound impact on our lives.

It made me realize how travel is not simply geographical, but overall emotional, upsetting feelings as deep as those of belonging and home.

The impact was for me twofold: confronting my French identity with the American culture and then confronting my new American identity with my French belonging.

This double process of traveling leads you to experience real differences, those that have a lasting impact on your life and make you realize how blind you have become to the fundamental differences that surround you.

Let me describe how it can teach you to embrace and make true differences and to experience and appreciate those of others.

The Sense of Belonging

Your identity is defined by the places you frequent and the places you live. Not only by the education and the cultural transmission you have received, but also by a sense of attachment to that which has hosted all your experiences and memories.

You feel a certain emotional sensitivity to the places where you grow up and thrive, where people precious to your hearts live, and where you settle your imagination, dreams and futur.

You feel a strong sense of possession for this part of the world that is so special to you, as if, to the same way that you belong to this region, this region belongs to you mentally, is part of your mental and psychological frame.

This sense of ownership is largely described by psychologists such as Dan Ariely in his book Predictable Irrationality, talking about the tendency to value much more what we own or seems like us. It relates to a notion as strong and profound as that of identity.

Your brains, your mind is literally structured differently, depending on the culture and the nation in which you have lived.

This perception of the world and of things generally locks you into a rigid framework, to the point where you do not even recognize the difference that constitutes and defines you as coming from a specific part of the world.

Your origins make you judge things from a point of view whose origin cannot be traced, since the origin is literally you, the place from where you stand and come from.

But this does not mean that you cannot take a step back from it.

Traveling Across Real Differences

When I traveled to the US, I was gradually amazed by all the small differences I encounter in my daily life, I find myself emerging in a changing environment of slight discrepancies.

When you travel, you realize that your reality is consistently surrounded by these differences that you didn’t even know existed. You feel every day an adrenaline rush that stimulates your whole body, excitement in front of a world that is never exactly as you expect it to be.

You discover a whole new universe of small differences not really all intelligible, but which remain sensitive to those who open themselves up to the strangeness of a foreign country and culture. Little by little, you acquires a more acute and sensitive ability to find and feel differences where they are.

This experience has confronted me with true differences: neither the American experience adjusted to my French cultural framework, nor the French experience modified by the American way of living, but the pure difference laying in-between.

Gilles Deleuze is one of the thinkers who has best forged this notion of pure differences, notably in The Logic Of Sense.

In his book he explains that when you change, it is not exactly you who become something else. It is the two things defining you that change and shift: what was your old self becomes acquainted with your new self, while what is your new self becomes acquainted with your old self.

The first step of this process is generally well known : you adapt to something that is foreign to you and you’re on the way of becoming something else.

Yet, the second stage of this process, as essential, is often ignored: when you confront with your own culture as radically strange, your own identity as fundamentally foreign. When that happened, you realize that what you’re most familiar with, yourself, comes and grows from different places.

And this event in particular has a profound effect on your lives.

How to Spot and Make The Real Differences in Your Life

Travelling is like cutting yourself into several pieces, living the flow of becoming as a double, even triple, quadruple process, the more and more you face new differences.

It is discovering that deep within you there is a being whose aspirations bloom from several origins and to several directions, who is not reduced to a single identity but to moving identities all eager to express themselves.

This does not mean that your being is confused. There can be an order that can emerge from all your profound differences, building the richness of your self.

For me, when I gradually settled into an order that was fundamentally different, that is the American culture (which apparently seems so close to European culture, but actually the difference is immense), I discovered that I didn’t have to sacrifice the old part of my French culture, nor the new American part of me growing up.

I discovered that I could make these two tendencies coexist within me. Even more, I realized that the old part of me was also foreign to me, that it too was a significant addition to my personality and not just an isolated and too familiar identity.

I realized that I could truly consider, take in hand and develop these different origins that defined me so deeply. I had now the ability to express them, transmit them and turn them into ways to boost my being and that of others, like forces that I could handle.

In this way, I empowered myself not only with the strong vision of America that I’ve appropriated, but also from the strong vision of France that the Americans curious of France have reflected back to me.

I’ve adopted both French and American ways of becoming, and launch them in a new direction, my own.

Like me, you can also travel, meet people and open your mind to intellectual, artistic and social horizons that are foreign to you and integrate them into your very being.

Forge your differences as strengths by spotting the intersections and coincidences that mix your identities, belongings and cultures.

By seeing these differences as double-edged weapons (the old difference meeting the new and the new difference meeting the old), you may deepen your experience of differences and build on your own strength.

You may then become the very different self that you definitely are.