Gonzalo Tudela: We Are All The Same

Imagine, if you will, that you are all alone in a jungle.  Your cell phone doesn’t work, you have no food, water or shelter, and you don’t have a map to guide you to safety.  The only thing you can do is wander aimlessly to your own accord.

As the sun’s rays find their way through the small slivers of this dense forest, you come across a great black panther on a path.  For what feels like a lifetime, the both of you lock eyes.  That emerald green, unlike anything you have ever seen, triggers your heart to race.  It begins to pound against your chest, racing with a mix of adrenaline, excitement, and fear.  You have never seen a great black panther before.

As the two of you ponder what to do about this encounter, you start to notice it, her body language.  It is telling you something.  Her shoulders are hanging low and her head looks heavy.  This beast looks defeated.  Your eyes continue their scan only to find that just below those deep green eyes, her black fur is wet. 

In a softer way this time, your eyes lock yet again.  You’re seeing them differently.  You see them water.  Could this defeated feline be crying?

A new feeling overcomes you.  A different feeling overcomes you.  Your fear, excitement, and adrenaline subside, as you no longer see this animal as something you don’t understand.  For a tear is universal, and we all know what it means.  A tear is a sign of emotion.

The China Study Tour has been, for me, a wonderfully unique experience.  On top of the factory tours and business luncheons, scaling Baiyun Mountain and traversing the Great Wall, or even stumbling home at 6:00 am after a long night of Karaoke, I learned one of the most valuable lessons in the seven years it took to finish my degree.  People are all the same.

Backgrounds may differ, languages may vary, and customs may draw from different beliefs, but every single one of us feels.  We feel love, pain, joy and sorrow.  We strive for acceptance in our own societies; we yearn to make our parents proud.  We all, in one way or another, live and breathe the very fabric of what it means to be alive.  It is innate, in all of us, a connection to one another that is beyond language.  It doesn’t take the alphabet, sign language, or even Chinese characters to understand someone else.  It only takes a face-to-face encounter to find a common understanding that human emotion is what connects us all on the deepest of levels.

Many of us experienced it in many in many different ways.  Some of us witnessed love.  Some of us witnessed pain.  But for the 2012 China Study Tour, we all witnessed emotion in some form or another.