The Game

Our life is the game. We all live in different communities; we are all influenced by various people, by those who are around us. Though even we have some same codes of morals in our being, there is still something that makes the rules, we live by, different: our cultural values, our traditions and attitudes towards various issues in a particular society, we grow up in. There is always some only aspect which creates the difference.  And this aspect makes our game.

 

People are created for adjusting. Every of us can get used to any conditions the Life has prepared. It only takes some time to get the things on the right places. However, when You start feeling comfortable exactly in this place, exactly in this circle of socialization, in this culture, and You suddenly have to change it all - how does it work? We could watch it while making an experiment in the class.

 

According to the teacher's experiment, the class was divided into 3 groups. We had to play a card game, the rules to which were showed on the separate sheets of paper for each single group.

At first we were just playing inside our "mini-communities" or "mini-cultures" - which I mean the student groups. We could talk, and we played for kind of "treats". Then we continued our game, but in the silence: everyone could only use gestures or drawings to explain anything. As far, as we all knew the rules of the game, we felt rather convenient while continuing playing. However, the next challenge was to switch the group for each "culture's" member, so that the only one original player of a group stayed in the same conditions, playing according to the original rules of his/her group. After switching we continued playing in silence. And starting with this point, some issues started to appear: the "freshmen" in each particular group started getting frustrated, upset and from time to time even got mad. They had no understanding about what was going on in their new "mini-culture". So, what was happening, You may ask? The trick was that the teacher had made the totally same regulations for the game for all the groups of students. All the rules were exactly identical. All, except the only one.

 

So, the teacher created the same conditions for all the "mini-societies", and only made a small different one for each group. And not being able to speak, people became captured by the situation. They were lost in the new "culture", and, moreover, they could not ask anyone for help. New people in a "society" were not prepared for this challenge; this aspect showed us this way the adjustment of the humans to the rules of a new community; it shows us the period of so called "cultural shock" - the period of adaptation to a new society, a new culture.

 

All in all,  playing this game, we could find out that our life in this world seems really quite the same somehow. Every culture has its own specialties, and every society has something that makes it identity. And You should remember that "when in Rome, do as Romans do". Use Your adjusting and communicative skills to feel comfortable in a new circle of people. Remember the rules of the place You are from, but respect the traditions of the place You stay in. Play Your game confidently, control the situation and be the winner in this Life.