Do we make decisions based on freewill? Or are we merely reacting to our past experiences and cultural conditioning? Last week, I fell off my bike and my first instinct was to jump up and check no one had noticed. Brushing myself down, I wondered whether my reaction was due to being British. If I had been in England I doubt I would have asked that question: it is only in different cultures that we see how our culture has shaped our personality into an identity.

I used to think different cultures allow us to experience alternative lifestyles and new ways of thinking, but after years of foreign travel and living abroad, I wonder whether I’ve truly ‘experienced’ anything. Everything is filtered through the lens of my own Britishness. Sometimes I praise a place for being similar to the UK (“The people in Hong Kong are so polite”), other times for being different (“Cambodian people are more alive and connected because they live close to the land.”) I used to think these were brilliant observations when in fact they are just surface-level judgments.

Recall your most recent journey abroad: I presume your reflections involve contrasting the destination with your home country, pondering how things should or shouldn’t be. It’s an interesting paradox — we venture abroad to “get away from it all” and then grumble that it’s “not what we expected” upon arrival.

Our cultural conditioning is deeply ingrained, and while this can be frustrating, we shouldn’t anticipate it to vanish the moment we board a plane — nor is it desirable for it to do so. Understanding different cultures doesn’t entail shedding our identity and adopting a new one, akin to tourists who return from India and behave as if they are Indian. No, the route to understanding different cultures lies in heightening our awareness of our own identity and how our culture has molded it. Without this, we cannot understand other cultures because we start from an unconscious position of bias. As Edward T. Hall put it: “Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.”

While abroad, it’s crucial to observe our reactions to the experiences we encounter. Only through this mindfulness can we detach from our judgments and genuinely ‘experience’ the new culture we have journeyed so far to explore. In this process, we become more attuned to ourselves, and this is where the real adventure begins.