Mo2vation:
Oh yeah, now that I see Catherine's response I remembered that I forgot to get back to this.
To me, the world without borders means actually a couple of things.
On the one hand, borders are boundaries--limitations, paradigms, containers for thinking....sometimes containers with lids...and in some cases, air-tight lids. So the world without borders is the world of possibilities. The ability to see things with an open mind, to look at a new idea critically from all angles or to revisit old thinking with new perspectives. Maybe it's the ability to ask an open question without cynicism or delivering a standpoint.
Secondly, boundaries are us-and-them. Ego driven thinking. The thinking that a particular piece of gear or a particular experience or a particular approach, ritual, belief, magic signal or movement makes you "better" than someone else in a human sense. In fact every time you've ever read something and thought "what an idiot"', then you're putting yourself in the us-and-them. You're disrespecting someone else's person for your own ego. If we really wanted to help each other, perhaps especially the ones you think need it, then we should try to get a point across without judging them. Some people are so ego-bound that they'll think that I'm an idiot for writing this....
The last thing I had in mind when I wrote that was the fact that the board has a particular dominant culture, namely American culture. This is just a matter of numbers and it's not a bad thing but it does come part and parcel with a certain kind of baggage, namely assumptions over norms in (written) communication. For example, in some places, hierarchical power (teacher/student, instructor/DM) has a different kind of behavioural norm than you see in America. The level of individualism is not universal across cultures. Neither is short/long term thinking or risk avoidance. It may even be different between different regions in the U.S. I think there are a lot of people on the board who don't travel much and/or don't have much of an idea about these things. Let's just say that I think we'd all understand each other better if we could take the time to think about the context in which things are being said. I say this a lot but it's not a stop-phrase to me. Communication is *all* about context and if we make too many assumptions about culture and/or what's motivating someone then we miss a big part of the context. Obviously this knife cuts both ways. Not everyone is very familiar with American culture either and some of the foreigners on the board seem to have trouble with context too. (There are even one or two who are simultaneously missing the context, are ego-driven and have "air-tight" lids
) Any way you look at it, I think if people challenged themselves to look at their own boundaries (ego, closed-mindedness and missing context (maybe better said as "ignorance" in the sense of not knowing)) then we'd have a greater number of more valuable discussions.
R..
