Cultural diversity as the complementary power of difference

i have been living in poland for about

four years

and today i’m here to share with you a

lesson

on cultural diversity that i had learned

and i hope can be universal

to begin what is cultural diversity and

how would you define it

well i asked this question to people

from different countries and different

backgrounds

and i was able to obtain a wide variety

of fascinating answers

some define cultural diversity as the

people

having different religion race talking

in different languages

living together some said that it meant

the existence of different cultures

and groups around the world having

different beliefs

interests and values

for some it was the people

who have different lifestyles

understandings

and habits because of the way they were

raised

it was the ability to meet at a common

point despite all these differences

and the beauty that prevented monotony

there was one definition that drew my

attention

one person called cultural diversity the

complementary power of differences

during my first year in poland i got to

have

a polish vietnamese turkish friend group

one polish person one vietnamese person

who had been raised in poland

and we a turk who had only been living

in poland for

a couple of months the language we have

used to communicate

was english which was a second language

for all of us

we all spoke different languages as our

mother tongue

we all had different appearances

our families had different religions

and we were brought up with different

traditions and in different cultures

there were times when i joked about a

situation that we were in or about the

topic that we were just talking about

and of course i would have liked my

friends to

laugh at it but sometimes

it was all silence well

to be honest sometimes joke might not

have been funny and that would be the

reason why they didn’t laugh i can

understand that

but at times i was thinking that it was

because

they had misinterpreted what i said

and one day we were planning to meet and

i wanted to change the

schedule time the message i tried to

explain them why

and at the end i remember that the

situation got so complicated

that my polish friend started to think

that we would not be meeting that day

and my vietnamese friend who was brought

up in a very disciplined environment

was mad at me because i had agreed on

the time but was trying to change it at

the last minute

with a reaction like this i believe is

connected with personality on which

culture has huge influence

and i was just reading through the

messages

and trying to write something that will

pacify my vietnamese friend and will

stop the misunderstanding for my polish

friend

to me the message i had written felt

extremely ordinary i had just wanted to

delay the meeting

but i was totally unprepared for the

reactions i got

and back then i was not able to

understand

why all this was happening

as i spent more time in poland with my

friends

i realized that the reason was because

of the differences

in the way we express ourselves and in a

way we

were used to understanding things

just like the expressions we were using

which in most cases did not have an

equivalent in the other language

because i was thinking in turkish

translating it to english and

expecting from a polish and vietnamese

person to

clearly understand what i was saying and

most importantly

what i was meaning

after this realization i started to

develop a

wider thinking style and broader

perspectives

with this i was able to

look at a situation of course more or

less

from their point of view and predict

what would their reaction be in return

and now these kinds of

misinterpretations

and misunderstandings occur less

frequently

consequently being exposed to cultural

diversity

and gaining more cultural knowledge from

my friends about their culture

has transformed my worldview and

i’m genuinely glad that i was able to

experience and

go through this change

and these differences we had did not

prevent

us from being with friends or being able

to share ideas together

even sometimes it enabled us to look at

situations from

different perspectives

in the moments cultural differences can

be so obvious

and this is actually the thing which

enabled me to realize that

i also had these kinds of

misunderstandings or

misinterpretations with my friends in

turkey

even if we were from the same city

brought up with similar traditions

even speaking the same language this

problem might still occur

i see now that culture is

multi-dimensional

we can say a continent’s culture like

asian or european

culture it can be referred to

countries regions cities towns and

this can go on like that till the

smallest formal community in the society

to families

and since culture is the heritage

that remains from our ancestors and is

passed to us

enriched by experiences of our families

well actually every single family can

have

their own culture

and then these people that are brought

up in the different cultures

in different families us

we form the society we live in with each

other

and by living together or being able to

do so

we complement each other

i find this situation similar to a color

palette with various colors

some of them are explicitly called the

complementary colors

and to create a painting you truly need

those hues to be different

so all of these different colors come

together and they create a hole

for this reason i believe cultural

diversity is

absolutely necessary also in our lives

at first it teaches us to show respect

to differences

it makes our lives more interesting

and it actually provides us a

continuous learning

so indeed it is the complementary power

of differences

and think for a second now

how is your culture being complemented

by another

and what are the lessons and points of

views you don’t know yet