Placing yourself elsewhere

For those lucky ones who weren’t aware of it, I have been filling in as the Bishop’s secretary for the last couple of months. Yes – I have been based at Bishopstow with a pen in one hand and a phone in the other, trying to maintain a sense of order to the office, and also attempting to be helpful and useful to the Bishop. For those of you who were painfully aware that I have been there, my deepest apologies!!

This is not something that was altogether new for me. I have done a couple of stints in the past – both last summer and the summer before, and every time it has been very interesting to get somewhat involved with the queries, problems and general work that so many hardworking people across the diocese, both those who are ordained and those who aren’t, carry out. It is the type of job that allows you a little window into the lives of others. This inevitably makes you very aware of what is going on around you, and the huge differences there are in the lives of each one of us.

This is true even within a group of people whose work has one common purpose, such as the family of the Diocese of Monmouth. Our lives as ‘lines’ may have many parallels and points at which those lines cross, but that doesn’t mean that our lives aren’t intensely individual as well – they are – and this is where those differences come from. Once you have reached this conclusion, it is possible to attempt to imagine yourself on someone else’s ‘line’, trying to see their problems and concerns, imagine what might make them happy and allowing yourself to get into their mindset. This often means having to pretend you no longer think the way you do – without this pretence, it is impossible to imagine yourself being someone else. And the more extreme you are when placing yourself somewhere new, the more important this ‘letting go’ of your real persona becomes.

Take Sri Lanka for example.

The lives that are led out there are very different to the lives that we lead here, and this is something which I had the opportunity to experience when I was out there for a few months a couple of years ago. Their thinking, their priorities and their culture are all very different to ours.

When I was out there, I tried very hard all the time to place myself within the lives of the people I spent my days, evenings and nights with. To do this with at least a small degree of success at the end, I had to be willing to let go of all my Western ways of thinking and my general Westernised mindset and I had to totally submerge myself in Sri Lanka. I had to train myself to think like a Sri Lankan thinks. I thus came to the conclusion that travelling has to be more than an experience – it has to be a state of mind.

But what’s the point of all this? Why try and work yourself into the thinking of another? The reason is simple. Once you have reached that point – the point at which you no longer have to go through the process of ‘becoming’ someone else in your mind every time you are doing something or speaking to someone, rather, you just ‘are’ someone else – only then can you really reach what everyone should be striving to reach all the time, which is understanding.

Clearly, this is an extreme case, and the understanding I had to try and reach was about understanding a different race and a different country. But bringing these thoughts into a more immediately relevant sphere, the challenge I faced in Sri Lanka is exactly the same sort of challenge that each one of us is facing every day with all the people around us: families, friends, work colleagues and even, sometimes, strangers. Most of us tend to forget that we need to be constantly looking at people in new and fresh ways. We should be attempting to place ourselves within the lives of other people – to see things as they see things – on a constant basis. This enables a deeper understanding for all of us about how we, as single individuals, work, and, consequently, should allow for better, deeper, more meaningful, relationships with each other.

Humphrey Amos

Humphrey worships at Newport Cathedral where he been a member of the choir for twelve years. He is a student at Reading University, reading Politics and International Relations.