Today I learned a lot about the culture here in Nepal, the Dos and Don’ts, and I was also given a Nepali name, “Suriya” meaning “the supreme light” or “sun”…I guess that suites me well. But something else stood out to me today.
The small group that I am in went on a quest to find certain landmarks, using only locals for directions. This was a fun trip and I enjoyed getting lost and learning from our mistakes. It was a bit of a lesson, everytime we got lost we would learn more about where we were and what to do differently. One of the major thoughts of this culture is that the only way to learn is from failures and challenges. Yes, we all believe that the only true way to learn is from our mistakes but I like how my program coordinator, Rajesh, spoke of this and of his many philosophies and thoughts. I will list a few below.
Rajesh spoke of how different their culture is from Western culture. A lot of what he mentioned is stuff that I had heard before but never as enthusiastically and well spoken. He spoke of how the only thing you have is the present moment, the past is history and the future is a mystery. We all may have heard this before but never described like this: Our western culture always focuses on the future, being upset about what happened yesterday, worrying about what will happen tomorrow, and we plan accordingly. We structure our time on this and always focus on the next thing, never really living now. If you really understand what this means, you can see that we always think about everything other than this small sliver of time called the present. And if we don’t live in the present, we aren’t living, because everything we experience is the present moment. And if the future comes, it’s the present moment, so we must always just go with the flow and live in the present. Sounds very rastafarian but he says “just take it easy, go with the flow”.
Everything is your mindset, if you think that every moment will be good, then every moment will be good. But our culture is always getting bombarded with negative news, devastating murders and tragic car accidents are always replaying on the media and we get absorbed in it. Negative news sells. These people in Nepal have so little, some have nothing but shacks but are still happy because of their outlook, they don’t think negative thoughts therefore negativity doesn’t affect them as much. What also goes along with this is what we think is important, will be important. If we think our phones are important, well they will be and when we can’t have them we will suffer. We create our own suffering in this way. We are the authors of every next moment.
Most people fail to acknowledge the fact that positives and negatives go together, without one, you cannot have the other. You cannot have day without night, you cannot have life without death. It’s a basic fact. So if we acknowledge that bad things are just our perception and that without the bad, there can be no good, then “bad” is just an imaginary concept that shouldn’t affect us.
Here are so pictures I took while out in the city today.
