Chapter 11: Starting Points
Close your eyes and imagine you have written a letter to a close friend. You have placed it inside an envelope, sealed it, written your friend’s address, and added your own address in case it cannot reach its destination and returns to you. Now try to remember how you wrote that address. It probably started with your house or apartment number, then the name of the street, the main road, the city, and finally the country you live in.
This simple everyday action plays a much bigger role than we usually realise. When you send a letter or invite someone to your house, you naturally begin with the most detailed part of your location and gradually move towards the most general one. It is almost as if you are sitting in your living room, explaining the journey from your front door to the outside world. For the person receiving the address to reach you, they need to adopt your perspective. They need to see the path as you see it.
But is this the only way of addressing a place? Definitely not.
In some cultures, including mine, addresses are written in the opposite direction. They begin with the widest layer, the country, and slowly move towards the more detailed parts: the city, the street, the building, and finally the house or apartment number. In this way, the person travelling to that place does not need to shift their perspective. The sender has already done that work for them. All they need to do is to follow the information step by step until they arrive.
You may think this is insignificant. In an age where Google Maps has become our unavoidable navigation tool, does the order of an address really matter? Perhaps not if the only goal is delivering a letter or arriving at your friend’s place for dinner.
I, however, believe these small habits reveal something deeper about the way we approach life and our relationships with others. The perspective we choose shapes the way we understand ourselves and the people around us, even if we do not notice.
The first approach may feel natural to people who are used to starting from their own position. I am here. This is how I see the world. This is the story from my perspective. The expectation is that others will adjust and understand their way of seeing things.
The second approach may feel natural to those who instinctively think about how to make things easier for others. They put themselves in the position of the person receiving the information and make an effort to create comfort and clarity. For them, this extra effort does not feel like a sacrifice. It feels normal. So when someone thanks them for it, they may genuinely wonder: For what? Wasn’t this the natural thing to do?
Now, think about it from a wider perspective. What if we have societies with the majority following the first perspective and other societies with the second perspective as their go to choice?
As an Iranian, I was raised with this instinct of putting an additional layer of care into my interactions with others. But it is not only because I grew up in Iran. Even when I have been far away from home, I have consciously chosen to live this way.
It took me time to understand that these differences do not make me kinder or warmer, nor do they make someone else cold or indifferent. They are simply differences.
Even when people from these different perspectives misunderstand each other, there is something fascinating about how strongly we interpret life through our own lens. How quickly we assume our way of seeing things is the natural one, sometimes ignoring the possibility that another perspective may also coexist with my own perspective.
Perhaps this happens because uncertainty is uncomfortable. We often search for one correct answer, one clear explanation, one fixed way of understanding things. I, however, have grown to appreciate uncertain answers. When we talk about human beings and the complexity of life, the more uncertain an answer is, the more honest it often feels.
