Attention, all passengers...

I have so many things on my mind that it's hard to relax. That's not usually a problem I have. I don't have issues with lazing on the couch until my back hurts. I really don't. I just reshuffle.

Well, as long as my brain isn't over-analysing everything. That's what it does when it's time to go to bed.

The funny thing is I obsess about stuff that would give other people basis to say yupp, he's gone bonkers. It's sort of a first-world-problem thing, I guess.

What if I get this flight instead of that one?

These three-for-ten-dollars corn chips are a bargain, but I like the other ones more.

It's embarrassing when I realise it and it makes me dislike myself. Why am I spending my time thinking about that?

Of course, it's really hard to talk to people about it, when they're struggling with hospitals and mortgages and shitty families. I just feel like a giant douchebag.

What is it they say – an idle mind is the devil's playground? Well, why the hell is mine like that? It's not idle – that's for sure. It's even worse, because instead of rethinking important stuff, it's struggling to solve trivial things.

I need to sort things out with people, let them know how I feel and what I think, and thus make sure I have less grey hair and fewer stomach cramps in the future. I need to tell people what I find utterly unacceptable and why I think I have a reason to get annoyed. I should chop down my Facebook friends list from 550 to 50, and make sure I surround myself with people I have respect for and who make me grin when I think of them.

And the only thing on my mind is how many extra frequent flyer miles is that?

Preface

Every time people from one culture look at people from another, they need to remember that, sometimes, this is not easy to do.

It is because, as we grow up in our own cultural spaces, we learn singular ways of looking at and thinking about the world without even knowing it, and it means that there are as many ways of looking at life as there are people and cultures. In this context, we also need to remember that all cultures think equally well, they just think differently. It makes it hard to appreciate the difference if we don't acknowledge at the beginning that it's there.

Sometimes it is important to try to see how the process of our looking actually takes place, and this is also a fair question for the people we look at to ask of us. It is often very interesting to see these processes and relationships between people as they actually are.

From Fighting for Survival - The Ngaanyatjarra of the Gibson Desert by Liz Thompson