Culture Shock Replacement

I've been thinking non-stop about a suitable replacement for culture-shock which my friend Hilary finds is an unfriendly and repressive term. She asked me yesterday, “can we come up with, right now, a replacement for that term?” But she was in transit and we didn’t have more than ten seconds to ponder a replacement.

Hilary’s on her way to the Middle East for the first time and everyone seems to be warning her that being thrown into a new culture and feeling disoriented is a “bad” thing. Can it not be a “good” thing?

I've come up with so far:

culture-stir

culture-birth

culture-awakening

I like the idea of birthing, of awakening when we are thrown into new surroundings. I also like Hilary’s summation: the opportunity of being in new surroundings is a time for standing back, taking in, for observing and respecting and remaining quiet.

And then when ready, I think, ask questions.

Here is the Oxford Dictionary definition of awakening:

A rising from sleep, or (in modern use, more commonly) from sloth, inaction, or indifference.

I love the notion of rousing or quickening to a new culture, and new sights, new sounds. Truly you are asleep to the whats, wheres and whoms you don’t know. This process of being born into a new life, essentially, is disorienting, and scary for sure. But it also affords us, in time, recognition of a community once unknown to us. And that can only better our understanding of our common human experience.

Traveling, truly traveling and leaving the prescribed routes, is a shock, certainly. But those of us who are fortunate enough to have traveled to cultures previously unknown to us respect the fear caused by disorientation. We celebrate our newly gained knowledge. The enlightenment that we achieve is what we are able to share with others and vitalizes the whats, wheres and whoms of our collective consciousness.