When I think about the idea of “culture shock”, the first thing that comes to mind is an uncomfortable experience related to a difference between my culture and another one. In Luis’ IE class this semester, we read the essay “You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus”. In that essay, the author told a story about being on a bus in Thailand and there being a person at the back of the bus yelling out instructions to the driver as a “back seat driver” would here in the U.S. The narrator feels tense and worried about the situation, and eventually realizes that this is a customary practice in Thailand, that this person’s job is to shout directions at the driver. The tension of the essay quickly resolves.

The tensions of culture shock are usually resolved in this way—sometimes quickly and other times slowly. Over time, one becomes accustomed to their new environment, and hopefully stops comparing the culture they are visiting to their home culture. But the theme of culture shock that I’m interested in exploring in this blog post is the idea that sometimes by adjusting to a new culture, we learn about our own temperaments. Specifically, I want to explore my experience of time while I was in Costa Rica and think about how my relationship to time has changed since I went to Costa Rica and came back.

First I want to express what I mean by “my experience of time in Costa Rica”. The first thing that comes to mind is when I met by friend Bryan for the first time and we spent about four hours walking through the city on a Friday afternoon. I don’t remember being conscious of time then. I was so excited to meet a local and be getting along so well. Usually I can’t spend four hours meandering around a new place because of time constraints, so it was a new experience for me. The next thing that comes to mind is the flexibility that both my host mom and all of my local friends had with me. If I was running late and I texted someone to let them know, I can only remember the response being something like “tranquila” (sometimes this felt more like a command than a comfort, but I realized that maybe my preoccupation with time was actually stressing out my friends!). It’s not that this laid back attitude is so different from my life in the U.S. Most of the people in my life are accommodating, especially family and friends. But there was some added meaning to it when I was there. Even though my time there was so limited, the people I spent time with treated me with the same relaxed attitude that they treated anyone else. If I couldn’t hang out on a given day, the understanding was that there would be another time. But comparing that to my life here…it doesn’t fit. My friends and I here, this year especially, constantly worry about spending as much time together as possible before we graduate. I remember the first day of the semester, everyone was saying “This is our last first day of school!” There’s kind of an obsession with the idea of finiteness, of our lives being like a timeline, of some kind of endpoint.

I don’t know if this view of life as a timeline is any different for Ticos (Costa Ricans). It could be that on some level it is the same. But somehow, the message that was transferred to me by my friends over there was that life was not to be rushed, and that everything would fall into place one way or another. My friend Sil would always say to me when I seemed stressed, “Hay más tiempo que vida”. To me, this phrase means that time outlives us, that it is a reality, but that it doesn’t have to control us. The English equivalent might be “we have all the time in the world”, but that doesn’t hold the same meaning for me (maybe because I am bias toward Spanish, I don’t know).

Coming back to the U.S., readjusting to the norms around time was a bit tough at first. My family and work responsibilities came back, and soon my academic ones did, too. This semester, my Fall of Senior year, I had to be extremely time-conscious in order to ensure that I had enough time in a given day, or in the entire semester, to fulfill goals I had for myself. But– and I’m going to do the classic “abroad changed me” thing here—I think that I’ve learned how to take advantage of time and use it to fulfill my goals, rather than letting time control me. And I’m not sure I would have been able to do that if not for the balance of being aware of time and keeping a calm mindset about it that I learned in Costa Rica. Now, I constantly evaluate whether the ways I’m spending my time make me happy. It’s always a balancing act, because responsibilities are a thing, but I honestly think I’ve become better at maintaining friendships, taking an active role in my education, and helping others since I got back from Costa Rica.