Teaching international students at Royal Roads University has shown me how the work I’ve done in understanding Indigenous ways of communicating can be adapted to many different cultures.
I’ve spent my adult years working to better understand Indigenous culture and identify areas of confusion when cultural differences arise.
Sometimes in life, we get so set in our ways, we lose sight of what’s important, and forget that sometimes our comfort comes at a cost to others.
Last week at the pool, I experienced a tangible metaphor of this.
I entered the pool in a section with two other people. It was the width of two double lanes. The three of us were “splitting the lane.” Each of us was swimming in single lines back and forth, parallel to each other.
This is very common practice in the pool until more swimmers enter and switch to a circle format.
When I saw a fourth person enter, I moved behind the swimmer next to me, thus starting the circle.
After a few more minutes, there were more swimmers and the section broke into two circles of swimmers.
The lady I was following had gotten out of the pool and another swimmer joined me from the other circle.
This new swimmer travelled in the circle but in the opposite direction, I realized, as swimming laps turned into a game of chicken.
I was the one to stop and swerve. She won.
I politely let her know we were going up and down the opposite way. The next lap, it was another game of chicken in the middle of the pool. I was confused.
As I was writing this column, I looked up swimming etiquette and it said: “check the lane-sharing method and lap-swimming direction.”
The swimmer told me that we were swimming the wrong way, and the circle next to us was going the right way. She even pointed out a man who was not even in the pool who had agreed with her about the direction.
I was so shocked that as she flipped at the end of the pool, there was time to bring a third party into this strange encounter. The amount of effort put into “being right” left such a sour taste in my mouth.
So, I turned around and swam the other direction. She won again.
I found this frustrating, not because of the directional change, but because I could feel this person’s desire to dominate me and unwillingness to accept something that ultimately didn’t matter. (I am sure I’ll get letters from swimmers for that).
The direction I was swimming in was based on the person who was swimming before me. From my perspective, I was being polite.
There was a sign at the end of the lane. It was small and couldn’t easily be read from far away. The deep and shallow ends on the sign mirrored how the pool was laid out, so if you followed the arrows as presented without reading the words, you would be travelling in the “wrong direction.”
We can look at something and say it’s wrong, but do we stop and question why someone is doing what they are doing — is there a reason? Does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Why, if something is different from what we would prefer do we try and force people around us to conform? Or even worse, bring in other people to shame someone?
As I swam, the quote: “When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind” popped into my head. It was relevant to me and the ornery swimmer, I thought.
In all aspects of life, we should be looking for the “lane-sharing method and directions.”
There are people with different values, beliefs, customs, barriers, challenges and traumas. If someone is going in a different direction and getting to the same place, in a safe way, why force them to change?
Why is your comfort more important than someone else’s?
Asserting dominance over someone for something trivial is a waste of time and energy. It’s kinder and gentler to go with the flow.
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