WHAT IS CULTURE, IF NOT HOW WE CHOOSE TO LIVE?

This morning my housemate told me that he would be fasting for the day because he lost his grandmother in Nepal. She was 80+ years old, quite old but for the day, he can only eat bananas and fluids; tea, water, cocoa. I doubt if he can take any soda drinks, he says he must not eat salt. If he was back home, he had to fast for 7 days but here, he must think of his health. He says it isn’t just him but all other members of his family must undertake the fast too.

The requirements were somewhat specific and he could reel them out effortlessly.
I found myself asking why. Why do you do all of these things? I mean why starve yourself for days if the dead is already dead. He says it is culture and different places have their own different cultures. I get that but I wanted to know the logic or reasoning behind the culture. How did it come to be? How did it develop? Was it propounded by someone who is noted in history? What was the story behind the development of it? Why that method or way of showing respect to the dead? Why not something else?

Recently I have felt more sharply than ever before the impulse to ask why. Why this culture? What is its significance? Perhaps because my lecturer in one of my classes played us a short video clip where the speaker told the story of how a mother would always cut the feet of the Thanksgiving turkey before sticking it in the oven. It was the Thanksgiving tradition in the family until her daughter asked, “Mom, why do you always cut the feet of the turkey?”. She answered that it was how her mom always did it. The inquisitive youngster then asked her grandmother why this was so and she answered that it was how her own mother did it. The youngster still unsatisfied with the answer asked her great grandmother at a family holiday why the turkey’s feet had to go off before it was stuck in the oven and the great grandmother explained how she used to own a very small oven which couldn’t take the full turkey, so the feet had to be chopped off for it to stick in the oven. It turned out that this Thanksgiving tradition was no tradition at all but an adaptation for survival based on the impediments that a small oven created for the great grandmother. Of course, now they had bigger ovens but because both the grandmother and mother never understood the why, they were quick to mystify that adaptation for survival with the age-long garbs of tradition and this is the case in many of our societies.

Many of the so called “culture”, “traditions” that we fight tooth and nails to keep and hold people to were specific adaptations to life and survival of a particular time and era. For one thing the world has evolved and continues to evolve drastically in the past centuries but we want to hold on to these relics of the past.
Culture is the way of life of a people. This means how a people choose to live simply put. If that is the case, we can choose a better way to live, can’t we now?

CATCHING UP WITH THE TIMES

Days ago, I found out that I have grown a single strand of white hair in each of my eyelids, sometimes in the past months. I guess stress and overthinking may account for this or I am just an old woman in a young body.  A very unusual occurrence because I am in my late twenties and I am yet to find any grey hair anywhere else on my body. I have always been an old soul, never really fitting with my generation, not the one before mine or the one after. Caught in the unusual middle ground of not fitting in anywhere.

I was born in the 1990’s, so I am in reality a Millenial. We are the generation of the introduction of the internet age. The worldwide web became the buzz under our watch. We saw the beginnings and the trappings of each of these new innovations. I recall the years of going to cyber cafes to check your mail and Facebook. That year, it was Yahoo mail and you had to buy internet time per 30 minutes or the hour. Now, you get data subscriptions and can check your mails on your phone, most phones even notify you when you get a new mail.

Struggling with the Canvas and University app of my school has made me realize how much I am not Gen Z and definitely not a tech savvy Millenial for that matter. I am the last to get aboard a new technological solution and the last to figure out all of the functions and capacities of it because I am just comfortable with the basic functionalities that I have figured out, until someone says “don’t you know your app can do X and Y?”. “It can” is usually my bewildered answer. I still call my friends to ask how to do something on this app or that, especially those apps that don’t have user-friendly interface. Count be lost and clueless. Yet, I have reasons to believe that I am highly cerebral. I don’t think it is the mental capacity to figure these things out that I lack, as much as the convinction. I am too much of an old soul. Those generation favoured minimalism. I am my Father’s daughter through and through. They just wanted enough to have a good life and all of our preoccupation in this age is lost on the most of them.

My programme is causing me to challenge all that I have believed before now, challenge myself and get out of my cocoon. I am required to do PowerPoint presentations for one thing. Colour me “in over my head”. Of course, I know the basics of Power Point, I have been around a computer for a long time. Got my first laptop as a part 1 student in the university. Thanks to my dad who even though he wasn’t proficient in those things himself, equipped us to be. I know that I can figure it out. I will figure it out. I cannot fail because failure is not one of the options and outdoing myself is what I live for.

Isn’t it interesting that now I have to learn how to be a Gen Z? Here is to always re-inventing ourselves 壟

© Fumsymoon