Several decades ago I was on a bus trip winding through the Black Hills of South Dakota on the way to Mount Rushmore. On board were twenty-four students from eighteen different countries.
It was my first time travelling overseas and my first time spending extended time with people from so many different cultures. I found myself watching everyone.
“So this is what people from Norway are like.”
“This is how someone from Chile thinks.”
“This is what a French person does.”
Then something unexpected occurred to me. I realised they were probably doing exactly the same thing to me. To them, I wasn’t an Australian. I was Australia.
Nothing about Australia had changed, nothing about me had changed, but everything about how I saw my place in that moment had.
I started relating to every conversation, every joke, every opinion and every action as though people were quietly asking the same question: “What’s Australia like?”
Nobody had given me that responsibility and nobody expected me to behave differently. Yet I did.
I hadn’t suddenly become Australia’s representative; I simply became aware that I already was.
Most people think experience teaches us facts, when sometimes it teaches us the role we’re already playing.
We tend to think people meet us. But often they experience something much larger.
A customer service representative becomes the company.
A police officer becomes the justice system.
A teacher becomes education.
The first female engineer on a team may become people’s impression of women in engineering.
Whether we like it or not, our minds constantly build models of larger systems through individual encounters.
We don’t meet countries; we meet people.
We don’t meet organisations; we meet employees.
We don’t meet professions; we meet professionals.
One interaction becomes the template for something much bigger.
When I climbed onto that bus, I was just Geoff from Geelong, a city most of the other students had never heard of. When I stepped off, I realised I had been representing something much larger than myself all along.
That experience didn’t make me think differently about Australia, but it did make me think differently about people.
I realised that wherever we go, we’re rarely seen as just ourselves. Someone, somewhere, is learning what the wider world looks like by watching us.
Have you ever realised you were representing something larger than yourself; your profession, your organisation, your country, or even your family?
This is Field Note #14. Field Notes are observations from my ongoing enquiry into experience. To learn more about how to make the most of your experience, read these posts next:
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