Submitted by Kylie Boggs on the 2019 World Scholars fall semester program in New Zealand…
The most important part of spending time abroad is embedding yourself into another culture’s worldview. Daily priorities, relationships, and customs change the way we see and interact with the world, and I received a crash course in that this week. I spent a day of my mid-semester break on a guided tour of Hobbiton and of the Waitomo glow worm caves, both of which rely heavily on how you see your surroundings. Throughout Hobbiton, the hobbit holes were all built to different scales depending on whether child doubles or adult actors were standing near them in a shot – our guide even told us that the cart in The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf and Frodo talked had to be nine-feet long to create the illusion of Frodo’s size! This phenomena, called Forced Perspective, makes you see exactly what the director wants you to see, it’s their way of lying to you. That obfuscation of reality is something we see in real life too, whether it be to hide our struggles or to explain away cultural practice, we often disguise the “behind the scenes” work that we do every day. Just like in the movies, we actively hide the process of creation and all too often only focus on the final product – but that isn’t the most interesting part of our lives or our personalities. Knowing how something works, knowing why a culture developed a certain custom, and knowing the effort that someone you admire puts into their work only makes those things richer and easier to appreciate. Spending time uncovering the background processes of our automatic assumptions and go-to patterns allows us to understand and change them, an integral aspect of personal and community growth. These processes can’t be hidden, we need to give them the perfect time and circumstances to be explained and nurtured. In the same way that the glow worms in Waitomo couldn’t be seen when the lights were on, sometimes you need to take a step back from your busyness and admire the work that got you there.
