India... Well that'll be an experience!

“India!  Well that’ll be an experience!”

It’s the most common reaction we get whenever we tell people where we’re headed.  With a few exceptions, as far as I can tell it seems to be pretty much code for “Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?”

People who’ve already travelled to amazing India often tell us we’ll love it- the people and the place will get into our bloodstream and we’ll be back, they reckon.  Some of those who haven’t been there- probably conjuring up the familiar and stereotypical image of chaos and poverty and corruption and insanely passionate cricketers- fumble for words and come up with ‘an experience.’  I guess it's just safe to say the reaction is mixed.  But either way- people go for the word 'experience'.

And I kinda like the fact that they’re choosing to concentrate their efforts in this realm.

It makes me wonder what ‘an experience’ is and how we have one.  The fact is, there are thirteen of us embarking on this adventure together and while we’re all following the same itinerary-checking into a hotel in Kolkata overnight, loading up a mini bus to travel two hours north to an industrial city, Durgapur, where we’ll stay with the local church and visit education and health projects, then heading back to mosey around in Kolkata and Delhi- we’ll all be having totally different experiences. 

It’s not just the material things that’ll be different for us- who enjoys the food, who ends up sitting next to Brydie and her 9 stuffed animals on the bus.  It’s how we interpret the raw material we’re faced with.  And it’s the interpretation I’m interested in.  After all, some people travel the world and are changed forever.  Others come home and buy a new flatscreen.

Why is that?  Seems to me that our own personal filters determine what kind of picture of the world we come away with.  Think of Instagram- that fabulous little photo app I’ve become so fond of.  Take a raw picture- you can think of that as the ‘way things actually are’ or the experience we’re all having together.  Already, of course, in taking the picture we’ve made a number of decisions about where to focus, what to crop in and out, how much to zoom.  It’s exactly the same in life depending on what parts of our experiences we choose to dwell on.   Do we focus on the comedy or the tragedy?  The boredom or the chaos?  The creativity or the frustration?

On top of that apply a filter- more light, less light, different tones.  Add a frame.  What we come away with is the same picture, but cast differently depending on the choices and mood of the person doing the creating.

In real life, our filters are our backgrounds, past experiences, temperaments, values and expectations.  All these things mean that we’re already changing the picture even as we’re walking into it to be part of it.  Jem and Brydie, embarking on this great adventure, already have some pre-conceived ideas about things like poverty, the ideal way to react to vomit, ‘helping’ and India itself.  But they hardly know they hold these ideas- they're born of experiences and conversations they’ve had with family and friends since they were old enough to talk.  Their different personalities pre-dispose them to either warm to this experience or to shy away from it.  And their different personalities pre-dispose them to deal with their feelings in different ways. 

I’m reminded of that quote from the Torah:  “We don’t see the world as it is.  We see the world as we are.”  Any experience we have is a combination of our personality, our expectations, our values- our own special, hardly-noticed spin.

Just recently I realised that I literally wear ‘rose coloured’ glasses.  A pair of migraine busting super-polarised dark brown tinted Ray-bans, they seldom leave my face and give the world a very pleasant rosy hue.  Sunsets look amazing through their lens.  (Poles in the underground Station at St James, on the other hand, look like nothing much, which is how you can get painfully up-close-and-personal with them if you’re running for a train.) 

My literal lenses pretty much mirror my philosophical lens, which is a nice little coincidence: optimist with realist leanings.  How did I get that way?  Who knows.  Genes.  Early life experiences.  Decisions that have reinforced my way of seeing the world…  What’s your lens?

Anyway, we’re on the flight to Singapore, and I’ve got on the glasses because my head has been pole-axing all morning.  I’m a little tanked up on painkillers, Coke and some very tasty roasted peanuts, courtesy of Singapore Airlines.  We’re on the top deck of the 787 or whatever combination of numbers it is that flies the double-decker.  Beside me, Jem, Brydie and Doug are glued to screens and giggling quietly every now and then.  Across the aisle, mum and dad are also engrossed.

To tell the truth, I’ve felt a little anxious at times about dragging my entire family into the unknown, beset as we are at every turn with people raising their eyebrows and dangling the sceptre of Deli belly and humidity and heat and electricity cuts and poverty and and and…  I understand the concerns.  I also think about the opportunities and resent some of the stereotypes.  But for me, the experience isn’t just about ‘teaching my children how lucky they are’ or ‘seeing how the other half live’ or 'being inspired' or anything else that’s entirely about us. 

It’s more about making a connection, as feeble and shortlived as that will inevitably be.  And hoping that somehow that’s a connection that will continue to unwind in ways I haven’t yet figured out, for all of us, at both ends, beyond the couple of short days we’ll be together.  Connections are complicated; maybe they take years to bear fruit; maybe they’re in the mind and the heart as well as in the physical realm…  And they’re not always comfortable.  They change us.  They change others.  

Okay, to be honest I don’t know exactly what kind of experience I’m hoping for.  But it's something along those lines. Does that sound a bit rose coloured? Given we’re all coming at this from different places, it probably is.

Guess we’ll wait and see.