Can You See Me Now?

I am often reminded of other's directional challenges. It is sad to say but they couldn't tell you how to get to their house from any given location, even if it was in their home town. Call me prideful, but I delight in my directional abilities. I remember traveling to Dallas, Texas a couple summers back. By the time we left after the week long vacation, I felt comfortable navigating the streets of downtown Dallas.

In terms of directions, I relate much more closely to my dad. Mom is a different story. Landmarks and Map Quest, not cardinal references, are her friends. Whenever we go somewhere new, the old Map Quest printout finds its place on the dashboard of her car. Whether we are traveling afar for a week to who knows where, or going to an unfamiliar part of town, Map Quest has received one too many chances in my family. It has deferred us from the correct route multiple times. I'm sure I've lost at least 10 hours of my life to being lost in transit, complements of Quest's inaccurate directions.

I prefer when dad drives; I typically gain back these hours in speedy and efficient trips of transit. But these drives wouldn't be complete without the inevitable words of the other person trying to drive the car---the passenger. This frustrates my dad. I laugh. Dad typically prevails, but not without a brief moment of intensity. As a family, we have never missed a destination completely...we are just always late. If only a compass had a time watch on it. Once the time was up, so too would the directions disappear. If that were the case, people would actually make an effort to be on time. It would only take one time of humiliating absence or tardiness from being lost for a change to occur.

This has me worried. If some people can't navigate a three-mile radius from their house to surrounding realms of civilization, how in their right mind will they navigate between converging cultures????? Need not fear. The awesome part of cultural collisions is this: they take place everywhere. You don't have to have a love for world travel to experience the exchange of cultures. Open your eyes. Look through a pair of international glasses and you will be surprised at what you see. Indeed, we are blind to the obvious sometimes. It's like getting glasses in first grade. I could actually see the leaves on the trees. It wasn't that they hadn't existed before; they had always been there. This was just the first time I saw them.

So put on those glasses. Can you hear....wait, rather, can you see all the vibrant cultural collisions now?