A Mug Full

Lessons learned on Remote Year

Every month, the community I’ve travelled with for a year on Remote Year got together and told personal stories under a specific theme. This is the write-up of my story for the 12th and final month, about “Lessons Learned on Remote Year”.

The first time I had a deep, incomprehensible, irreconcilable difference of opinions this year was in Prague, during our community’s second month together.

To this day, we know it as ‘The Mug of Milk Controversy’.

While playing a board game, I mentioned ‘milk’ as one of the things one can drink out of a mug. Someone contested it. There’s no such thing as drinking milk out of a mug, they said.

But I’d been drinking milk out of mugs my whole life. I don’t mean to judge anyone, but drinking milk out of a glass grosses me out. Actually, at this point in my life, the thought of drinking milk grosses me out.

The point in the game was eventually conceded. But I was still outraged. Naturally, I took this debate to Facebook and polled my friends on how they drank their milk. Many of them told me I was ridiculous, but a handful gave me the arguments I needed to prove that yes I, with my mug of milk, was unequivocally right and all them glass-drinkers were wrong.

More deep, incomprehensible, irreconcilable differences peppered this year. It’s unavoidable when traveling across so many different cultures with a group composed of people from all walks of life.

I’ve always considered myself open-minded.

But I had to hit my head a few times this year to really internalise that in life, it’s rarely about being right.

I had to hit my head a few times this year to agree with the people who told me I was indeed being ridiculous. There’s really no right or wrong about our preferred means of ingesting (or not) the cow juice. It’s all about finding the delicate balance between celebrating our differences and standing our ground (and occasionally taking unreasonably strong stances on meaningless topics).

It means drinking both tea and coffee in the morning because, after living with a heavy tea drinker for a year, I can now appreciate both, and recognise that tea is not the devil’s weak piss after all. At the same time, it also means refusing to boil my eggs even a second over 6 minutes and a half, despite intense daily debates over the optimal cooking point for eggs.

People do things differently. We have often diametrically opposing believes. We survive. Countries do things differently. It’s not the end of the world.

Let’s toast to our differences, with our glasses and mugs full.