I turned 18 in November 1989. About three weeks later, I finished Year 12. Two months later I washed some dishes at The Australian Open. Two weeks after that I flew to South Korea to teach english.
My sister was in Korea at the time but wasn’t enjoying it and was planning to leave soon to go to Japan. She had asked me to bring vegemite. I was traveling with the only large bag I owned: a soft blue tote bag I’d been using to carry cricket gear. When the customs officials at Seoul airport inspected my bag, wrapped inside my best shirts were hundreds of shards of broken glass, each one coated in thick, strange-smelling black goo. He shook his head and waved me through.
Men in blue military uniforms, with their pants tucked into black boots and machine guns on shoulder straps, moved around the arrivals hall. The building had thin walls, a grey concrete tile floor, and was dimly lit. It had the make-shift, temporary feel of a basketball gym or a large barn. People milled about then moved off. To me, the light coming through the doorways had a glaring, post-nuclear brightness. I walked outside, past the guards, and saw that in reality it was the glare of sunlight coming through thin white-grey clouds of pollution and bouncing off grey concrete, ice and snow - a palette of colors I’d never seen before.
My sister hadn’t arrived to meet me.
This was before mobile phones or Facebook. I went back inside and lugged my heavy bag around for a while, wondering what to do. Stay and wait? Go out, get on a bus and see where I end up? Get on a plane and go back home? I rested my back against a square pillar in the middle of the arrivals area and sat on the floor.
People said things to me. Guards came and spoke to me. No one spoke English. But they looked concerned, confused and frustrated by my strange behavior.
People hawked and coughed behind their cloth dental masks, then lifted them aside to spit. Many men and women - not cleaners or officials, just ordinary people going about their business - were wearing thin white gloves. I was sitting on the floor. The same floor everyone hawked and coughed and spat on. Normal behavior would have been to move, to meet someone, know what I was doing or where I was going, and leave. Failing that, the normal thing would have been for me to squat on my heels and, at the very least, keep my ass up off the spit-covered floor. But I didn’t know that. I had no knowledge, no experience. It took me an hour of waiting to even begin to see.
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What is memorable about this experience for me is that I wasn’t anxious about being confused. I was stunned by the way groups of friends all walked arm-in-arm, how people sitting on a bus would take my bag and hold it in their lap if I was standing, and if I was sitting then people would pile their bags in my lap. I was shocked by the drinking - men spilling out of tiny road-side tent-bars at the same time every night, blind drunk on saki and weaving down the footpath, shouting - and the sexism. I was delighted to find other letters hidden between “p” and “b”, “t’ and “d”, “k” and “g” and “r” and “l”. I learned which way up to hold my palm, where to point my feet in a temple, and the strange ways Koreans hear the sounds of animals. Dogs, for example, don’t bark or woof, they mong.
I didn’t know any of this, but how could I? I was learning. It was a great confronting muddle I had given myself the chance to begin to untangle. Being confused most of the time was the only sane way to be, so I was anxious about other things (learning to walk on black ice while wearing business shoes, being deported and being mistaken for an American soldier, for starters) but not about being confused.
I’ve been in situations where I have felt I had no room to be confused. There are situations where this is appropriate. No one driving a car should be especially confused about how to make it stop, for example. A surgeon should not be confused about where to cut. (He or she can be confused beforehand, just not at the moment of cutting.) But there are other situations - job interviews, for example - where my greatest source of stress is the fact that I’m supposed to know what I’m doing! and all this does is create a weird, intense pressure to pretend, to invent and to outright lie. Bizarrely, this seems to be almost expected. it is the game: we know you don’t know, but you have to pretend you do so we can give you the job and then clean up the mess afterwards.
Traveling puts me back into a context where I feel that I have permission to be confused. I like culture shock. I miss it and get frustrated if I travel and don’t get lost, bewildered, surprised and shocked. 10 years after going to Korea, when I and a friend cycled around parts of Italy, we reached southern Italy and it had all been so predictable (lovely, undoubtedly: beautiful food, nice churches, great views... but nothing challenging, nothing that opened my eyes the way landing in Korea had) I stood there looking at the Mediterranean sea and thinking that it would be so much better if we just caught the ferry to Tunisia and rode west. I wanted to get arrested, go hungry, meet Bedouins, fall in love, learn things I had no idea about, and be gloriously confused.
For various reasons that did’t happen, and I wonder how much the desire for confusion fades as get older, or as technology and education conspire to increase our fear of it. Wireless mobile technology, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Google are a powerful combination when it comes to eliminating the number of things we don’t know, and the amount of time we spend not knowing. The fear of it creeps in. It makes me feel, at times, as if I am expected to know now, much more than I used to. Confusion, in this mindset, equals being behind, being out of touch, out of the loop.
So I wonder how students, who should have every permission to spend their days not knowing, struggling to make sense of concepts they haven’t met before, feel about being confused.
In Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code, he mentions that American students spend, on average, 2% of their time actively struggling with concepts and ideas. The other 98% of the time, one might assume, they are being coached in and practicing diligently the high art of looking like they know what they are doing.
Personally, I’d rather sit in spit.
Cheers,
Tim
These articles are all a lead-in to the next issue of Metta. Sign up to get updates and be the first to know when Metta #2: Confusion is available.
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