Love Your Foreigner as Yourself (Dec 25-31)

This week in snapshots:

Lived in: Kawasaki City
Reading: 6 Secrets to Living a Fruitful Life (C. Peter Wagner)
Album: Monstercat Holiday Hits
Watching: We're here because we're here (John Green)
Playing: The Crew Mission Deep Sea
Making: this website
I learned: A single strand of spaghetti is a spaghetto.

Merry Christmas! I hope your first six days of Christmas have been wonderful!

I've really enjoyed being the foreigner for a bit. You walk through the train station and sit in a metro car and you're the only white people there. Everyone else there (and there are PLENTY of everyone elses) is gloriously Asian.

I watch them and marvel at how put-together they appear. And while the Japanese are significantly more put-together in public than any American in 90% of the circles I run in, I realized at some point that I can't tell who isn't put-together and who just threw something warm enough on to get out the door. I look at them all with wonder!

Everyone looks elegant to me! And yes, that's partly because so many of them are in wool trench coats with scarves (peak casual elegance fs 👌), but just as many of them are in baggy jeans and layers of fuzzy sweaters and hoodies, or skinny jeans and puffy jackets, or the occasional crewneck and joggers or even in slippers! with their pants tucked into their socks! and they all! look! elegant! to me!

I can't tell whose fashion is outdated and whose fashion is hip. It all looks like elegance to my foreign eyes! And while I'm sure they look at me with a measure of "ugh, white tourist," it makes me wonder if my blunderingly American presentation isn't also covered up by my foreignness into a kind of elegance.

So I've been experimenting with using these glasses of "foreign elegance" on myself - can I change the way I think about myself by looking at myself the way I'm looking at all of these strangers? With wonder? at the way they do the most ordinary things - like ride the train? Or walk in the park? Or take pictures of themselves and each other?

I think of myself as a goofy goober, but surely someone is looking at me wondrously as the peak of European elegance. And as someone who is, I assure you, NOT the peak of European elegance, that wondrous someone might just get to be me…

When/where/how do you look at yourself wondrously? With all of the admiration in the world? And if your inner critic is as loud as mine, where would you like to see yourself as the pinnacle of elegance?

I'm having a blast being out of the US, and can't wait to do it again 😎 I would also love to hear some of your tales about being the foreigner, if you have some good ones to share 😁

Peace be with you as we leave 2022 behind,

Love, Beth