I used to think I knew who the “other” was. The ideology I’d inherited in my early years prized safety and drew clear lines: here were my people, there were theirs. Here was truth, there was error. The world seemed simple when someone else had already mapped it for me, labeled every territory, marked the borders I shouldn’t cross.
Then I accepted an invitation to share a meal.
I don’t remember now which culture first welcomed me into their home, which unfamiliar kitchen first filled my senses with spices I couldn’t name. What I remember is the jolt of recognition. The way a mother fussed over whether I had enough on my plate. The way a father’s eyes crinkled with the same pride mine did when talking about his children. The way laughter sounded exactly like laughter, even when I couldn’t understand the words around it.
It shattered something in me that needed shattering.
The ideology I had carried — safe, cautious and complete — had never actually served me. I never examined it, never held it up to the light of actual experience. I simply received it, the way you might accept a coat from someone without checking if it fits. And I walked through the world in an ill-fitting garment, wondering why I kept stumbling.
Being a student of life means something different. It means showing up with your senses open. It means trying the food you can’t pronounce, listening to the music that doesn’t fit your predetermined categories and attempting the activity that your borrowed worldview says isn’t “for people like you.”
I have stood at a welding torch, molten metal pooling into forms I’d imagined. I felt the particular resistance of ice under blades, learned the different rhythm of wheels on pavement. I coaxed flavors from ingredients, solved problems with equations, shaped sound from strings and air. Engineering and cooking, fabricating and music, skating and lifting, boxing and running, each one a different way of asking the world questions and listening for answers.
None of these skills came from ideology. They came from curiosity, from the willingness to be bad at something before being good at it, from keeping my hands and mind open to what is rather than insisting on what should be.
When you follow someone else’s pre-arranged ideology, you’re essentially agreeing to see the world through their eyes. You taste with their tongue, hear with their ears, think with their borrowed brain. You mistake their conclusions for your own understanding. You defend positions you’ve never truly examined, dismiss experiences you’ve never actually had, fear people you’ve never genuinely met.
But when you become a student of life, the world explodes into complexity and nuance. You discover that the people you were taught to fear are worried about the same things you are: their children’s future, their parents’ health, whether they’re doing enough, being enough, loving enough. You find that truth rarely fits into neat categories, that the most interesting questions have answers that begin with “it depends,” that certainty is often just fear in disguise.
So how do you actually do this? How do you become a student instead of a follower?
The practice begins with subtraction more than addition. Stop performing certainty about questions you haven’t truly examined. Stop answering definitively when you don’t actually know. Stop filling every silence with unsolicited noise, as if your voice is required to validate the moment. Stop judging others for walking different paths, and stop giving attention to those whose only contribution is judgment.
Listen to understand, not to craft your response while someone else is still speaking. Ask questions to learn, not to trap or score points. Don’t be contrary for the sake of being contrary, if you can’t construct a cohesive argument that genuinely serves the search for truth, you’re performing for yourself, not contributing to understanding. Let go of the need to win every exchange and embrace the freedom of not knowing, of being wrong, of changing your mind when reality demands it.
This is what it means to actually see, hear, taste, smell and touch the world as it is.
I think about the meals I’ve shared, the conversations that challenged me, the moments when someone’s kindness or wisdom or humor broke through the story I’d been told about who they were supposed to be. I think about every skill I’ve learned, every discipline I’ve explored, each one teaching me that competence comes from engagement, not from believing the right things about engagement.
The difference between ideology and understanding is the difference between a map and a territory. The map is clean, simple, fits in your pocket. The territory is vast, contradictory, alive. You can spend your whole life studying the map, memorizing its legends and boundaries, defending its accuracy against those with different maps.
Or you can set it aside and walk the actual ground.
I choose the ground. I choose the stumbling and discovering, the being wrong and learning better, the endless apprenticeship to reality itself. I choose to see it all, not filtered through someone else’s fear or ambition or need for control, but directly, with my own imperfect but honest senses.
This is what it means to be alive: not to inherit someone else’s warped conclusions, but to build your own hard-won understanding, one experience at a time, one opened door at a time, one shared meal at a time.
The world is so much larger than any ideology can hold. And we are so much more alike than any boundary can express.
All we have to do is be willing to look … To see it all.
Corey Bergeron is a classically trained chef based in Weare with his wife and daughter.