The Elephant We Are: A Journey Toward Understanding

A reflection on culture, consciousness, and the humility of understanding that no single gaze contains the whole world

This morning two messages arrived that lit something up in me.

The first was a familiar image: several blind men around an elephant.

One touches the trunk and says: "It's a snake."

Another wraps his arms around a leg: "It's a tree."

Another runs his hands along the side: "It's a wall."

None of them is lying. None of them is completely wrong. And none of them is entirely right either. Each one is describing, with absolute sincerity, the part of the animal he happened to touch.

Minutes later another message arrived: a list attempting to rank countries by traits of extroversion and introversion. Nicaragua, my small country, appeared among the most extroverted.

I don't know how much a classification like that can really say about millions of human beings. But the coincidence of both messages left me thinking. How many times do we do exactly the same thing with peoples? We visit a country. We learn one custom. We read one statistic. We live one experience. And we believe we've come to know the elephant.

Perhaps understanding another culture requires something different. Becoming, for a moment, a worm to get close to its roots. And then a bird to observe the wider landscape. Descending. Rising. Getting close enough to feel. Stepping back far enough to connect the dots.

Not to find a definitive explanation of a people. But to remember that behind every culture there are centuries of geography, migrations, losses, celebrations, wars, foods, languages, songs, decisions, and memories. This is not tourism. It is archaeology of the human soul. And the more we dig, the harder it becomes to judge easily. Not because every action is right. Not because every idea is equivalent. But because we begin to understand something elemental: every gaze has a history.

We are different pieces. Different jewels. Parts of a mosaic that none of us can see in full from where we stand.

Cairo: the same window, two universes

May 2023. Egypt. One of those trips that, in hindsight, seem to have begun long before the ticket was bought.

Our Ukrainian friend had arrived at the hotel a day earlier. When she greeted us, she had deep circles under her eyes. She was smoking nervously and seemed desperate to warn us about what she'd found.

"Ask for a different view!" she told us. "I got stuck with horrible ruins. A baby cried all night. I couldn't sleep. It's awful."

We went up. I opened the curtains. And I stood there looking. There was rubble. Construction. Disorder. The remains of structures. Exactly what she had seen.

But something different happened inside me. "Look at this," I said. "It looks like they're tearing down the old foundations to build something new."

She looked at me as if I were speaking another language. And I probably was. Not because either of us had a superior consciousness. Not because she was seeing it wrong and I had discovered "the truth." We had arrived at the same window carrying different lives inside us. She saw destruction. I saw possibility. And both things could exist simultaneously in the same landscape.

Over the following days we walked through Luxor, Karnak, and the Valley of the Kings. Places where the scale of time inevitably reshapes the scale of our problems. Something began to shift in her.

Some time later she found her own meaning in that first night: the crying baby, the rubble, the discomfort. Elements that had initially been nothing but annoyance began to take on a different sense for her. I don't know if the universe had sent her a message. I don't need to know. I know something simpler. The meaning changed. And when the meaning changed, so did her relationship to what she had lived through.

Two people. The same window. Two inner universes looking outward. Perhaps that is the parable of the elephant in action.

Nicaragua: the part of the elephant that taught me how to see

I was born in La Esperanza and grew up in El Rama, on Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast. A place of water. Rivers. Jungle. Rain. People arriving and leaving. El Rama carries in its name the memory of the Indigenous Rama people, and it grew as a connecting point between the country's interior and the Caribbean. There, accents, origins, and different ways of being in the world lived side by side. Caribbean Creole. Spanish. Indigenous communities. Mestizos. Merchants. Travelers. Even in that small place, the world reached us. Perhaps that's why I learned early that a single reality can speak several languages.

Nicaragua is fire and water. Volcanoes cutting across the horizon. The immense Cocibolca. Ometepe rising out of the lake with its two volcanoes. The Caribbean and the Pacific belonging to the same territory and yet telling entirely different cultural stories.

And then there was the El Rama of my childhood. The rain could fall for days on end. The streets turned into water. The yards, into mud. The zinc roofs amplified every storm until it became music. At night the frogs arrived, the crickets, the toads, the thunder. And we, the children, ran barefoot under the downpour. We bathed in the water pouring off the roofs. What for an adult could be disaster, for us could become a party.

But there was also war. The eighties cut through Nicaragua with violence, shortages, rationing, fear, and losses that should not be romanticized. Adversity does not automatically make people better. Sometimes it destroys. Sometimes it traumatizes. Sometimes it leaves wounds that last generations. And still, human beings develop extraordinary ways of continuing to live within it.

That's what I saw. My brother and his friends fished small fish out of the flooded yards. They fried them. They ate them. For a child, that wasn't a theory about resilience. It was simply life finding a way to keep being life.

Then came Hurricane Joan, in 1988. We returned some time later to a place covered in mud, fallen trees, wounded houses. Years later, Mitch would once again remind Central America of the sheer force of water. And yet I also remember music. Food. Families. Stories. Humor. People inventing solutions out of almost nothing.

I'm not saying Nicaragua is optimistic because its volcanoes made it that way. Peoples are too complex to explain with a formula. I'm saying something smaller and truer: that was the Nicaragua that taught me how to see. A place where I learned that the water that ruins an afternoon can also bring fish to the yard. That ash can destroy a harvest and later become part of the soil where another one will grow. That joy and suffering don't always take turns replacing each other. Sometimes they live in the same house.

My father once brought a man into our home who introduced himself as a Doctor Without Borders. We treated him like family. When we woke up, he had vanished with money and jewelry. For a long time that story could simply have been told as a story of deception. But I was always left with another question. What did that man actually take with him? He took objects, yes. But for a few hours he also experienced what it meant to have strangers open their door to him. That doesn't excuse what he did. Understanding doesn't mean absolving. But it taught me something I still try to remember: someone else's conduct doesn't get to decide who I choose to be. Perhaps that's one of the parts of the elephant that Nicaragua placed in my hands.

The peoples who have learned to be reborn

There are places whose history seems written over and over on the same page. Lebanon is one of them. Phoenicians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, French. Layers upon layers. The ancient Phoenicians played a decisive role in spreading an alphabetic system that would go on to influence later Mediterranean alphabets. Much later, Beirut would be called the Paris of the Middle East. And then it would know a devastating civil war. Destruction. Reconstruction. Another crisis. Another reconstruction.

Not because there's anything magical in Lebanese blood. But because people keep doing what human beings have done for millennia: reopen the shops. Cook again. Dance again. Raise the walls again. Mezze turns the table into a shared space. Dabke unites bodies in rhythm. Khalil Gibran turned human contradictions into literature. I don't need to say the phoenix was born there to understand why its image seems to belong to it.

There are peoples who remind us that being reborn doesn't mean going back to what we were. It means learning to exist after having burned.

Rwanda: what it means to try to live afterward

There are stories before which any metaphor must lower its voice. Rwanda is one of them. In 1994, approximately eight hundred thousand people were killed in around a hundred days during the genocide against the Tutsi, along with moderate Hutus and others who were persecuted and killed. Neighbors killed neighbors. Families disappeared. An entire society was left facing an almost impossible question: How do you go on after this?

There is no clean answer. Rwandan reconciliation has included justice, memory, state policies, Gacaca courts, community reconstruction, and also controversies and wounds that no inspiring narrative should erase. But there is something deeply human in the attempt. People who had to go back to sharing territory after having known the worst of one another. Communities forced to decide what it means to live afterward.

Umuganda, the practice of community labor, expresses another dimension of that collective building. And although Ubuntu belongs more broadly to philosophical traditions across sub-Saharan Africa and not exclusively to Rwanda, its intuition is relevant here: a person becomes a person among other people. My humanity doesn't end exactly where yours begins. We affect each other. We shape each other. We wound each other. We can also help each other rebuild.

Rwanda doesn't teach me that everything can be forgiven. That would be too easy to say from a distance. It asks me a much harder question: how does a society learn to live again when forgetting isn't possible?

Portugal: when loss learns to sing

Portugal has a word that resists perfect translation: saudade. Absence and presence at the same time. The ache of something lost. The longing for something that perhaps never existed exactly as we remember it.

For centuries, Portugal looked out to sea. Its navigators took part in a maritime expansion that transformed the world and that was also part of an imperial history whose human costs must remain part of the account. And then came 1755. Lisbon. All Saints' Day. Earthquake. Tsunami. Fires. One of the great cities of Europe lay devastated.

The catastrophe alone did not end the Portuguese empire, whose decline was far longer and more complex. But it shook more than buildings. It shook philosophical questions about God, nature, suffering, and the idea that the world obeyed a comprehensible order.

Portugal carried on. And its music found another way to hold absence. Fado doesn't eliminate sadness. It gives it shape. Perhaps that's another part of the elephant. There are pains that don't need to be defeated. They need a song large enough to hold them.

Chile: learning to live on ground that moves

Chile looks like a geography drawn as a boundary. The Andes. The Pacific. The Atacama. Patagonia. Thousands of kilometers of narrow territory stretching south. And underneath: tectonic plates periodically reminding everyone that the ground never promised to stay still.

I don't believe there's a single "Chilean character" produced by that geography. But I am fascinated by what entire generations learn when certain phenomena become part of daily life. Protocols. Memory. Architecture. Family stories. A familiarity with the movement of the earth that for others might be unimaginable.

And in that same narrow strip of land appeared Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara. Completely different voices moving through love, loss, politics, identity, and memory. The earth moves. People keep setting the table. There is wisdom in that. Not controlling the movement. Learning to build knowing that it can happen.

Brazil: no country fits in a single word

Extroverted Brazil? Introverted Brazil? Perhaps the question already contains the mistake. How do you reduce a country the size of a continent to a single personality?

Brazil contains the Amazon and the sertão. São Paulo and riverside villages. Bahia and Rio Grande do Sul. Samba and silence. Carnival and saudade. Capoeira. Bossa nova. Niemeyer bending concrete. Indigenous communities that predate the name Brazil. The immense African imprint, also born of a brutal history of slavery. Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese, Lebanese migrations, and so many others.

There isn't one Brazil. There are many. And perhaps that is precisely what Brazil contributes to this journey: the impossibility of reducing a people to a single trait. Every time we say "Brazilians are...," we're probably already touching only one part of the elephant.

Argentina: the country that talks to itself

Argentina holds an intensity that's hard to reduce. Patagonia. The Pampas. Mendoza. Iguazú. Buenos Aires. Tango. Psychoanalysis. Mate. Soccer. Literature. Also dictatorship. The disappeared. The Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. The Falklands. Wounds that are still being discussed, because a living society never finishes its conversation with its own past.

Tango was born of cultural crossings, immigration, working-class neighborhoods, and worlds that met around the Río de la Plata. Two bodies conversing without words. Borges turned infinity into a labyrinth. Mercedes Sosa made a continent out of a single voice. And Buenos Aires developed an extraordinary relationship with psychoanalysis and inner conversation.

I don't know whether Argentina is destined to spark any collective awakening. I don't need to prophesy that. It's enough to observe something that already exists: there are peoples who turn talking to themselves into a form of culture. Perhaps looking inward doesn't always require silence. Sometimes it can also sound like a tango.

Uruguay: a bus stop

October 2023. I forgot my credit card and couldn't rent the car I had reserved to go to Punta del Este. I had two options. Turn back. Or take the bus. I took the bus. I walked with my suitcase to a stop near the Montevideo airport. It was cold. The sun was out. People kept arriving. We waited. The buses went by with no room. And something strange began to happen to me. I relaxed. I looked around. No one seemed in a hurry to prove anything. No one seemed especially interested in me. They were simply there. Waiting for a bus. And for some reason, for a few minutes, that felt like heaven on earth.

Not because Uruguay is paradise. It isn't. It has inequalities, problems, contradictions, and pains like any society. Nor can I turn one morning at a bus stop into a sociological study of an entire country. But I can tell you what that morning produced in me. A question: what conditions allow a human being to lower their guard?

I thought about dignified work. About community. About institutions. About human scale. About trust. About the feeling of being needed without living under permanent threat. I thought about José Mujica, whose austerity while president became an international symbol of another possible relationship with power and consumption. I thought about mate passing from hand to hand. I thought about something much simpler. Perhaps heaven on earth doesn't always look like a revelation. Sometimes it looks like a bus stop. A cold morning. Strangers who pose no threat. And a body that, for a few minutes, understands it can stop defending itself.

I didn't discover Uruguay's secret that morning. I discovered a question I still carry with me. And some questions are better than answers.

The bridge we are

We all carry geographies within us. We are rivers fed by many tributaries. The Lebanese man cooking in São Paulo doesn't leave the Mediterranean completely behind. The Chilean woman teaching in Tokyo carries with her words, flavors, and memories that crossed the ocean with her. The Portuguese man opening a bakery in Newark bakes something more than bread. Every migration moves invisible worlds.

In Florida I see it constantly. Cubans. Dominicans. Nicaraguans. Haitians. Jamaicans. Brazilians. Venezuelans. Colombians. Argentinians. And so many others. Not necessarily melting into sameness. Living alongside one another. Influencing each other. Keeping their accents. Borrowing each other's words. Marrying. Cooking. Arguing. Raising children who belong to more than one story.

Maybe the world doesn't need to become a melting pot. Maybe it's more like a mosaic. Beauty doesn't appear because the pieces lose their color. It appears because we learn to see the composition. Each of us can be a bridge. Not because we have to explain our culture to others. But because our existence already proves that there are other ways of inhabiting the world.

The elephant may be in your neighbor. In your coworker. In the woman who cleans an office. In the man who drives a taxi and learned four languages because life carried him through four countries. In someone whose story you would never know if you only looked at their function.

The question then changes. It isn't: what can you teach the other person? It's: what part of the elephant can the other person see that you could never discover on your own?

The elephant we are

After traveling, reading, and meeting people from very different places, I've arrived at a conclusion that contradicts the title of this journey. We cannot see the whole elephant. Neither can I. That, perhaps, is the point.

We can move. We can listen. We can change position. We can touch one part and then another. We can ask whoever is on the other side what they feel under their hands. We can gather stories. We can study history. We can travel. We can love someone raised in another world. We can let someone else's truth make ours feel incomplete. But we will always be looking from somewhere.

Consciousness doesn't consist of reaching a point from which we finally see everything. Perhaps it consists of knowing that we don't see everything. That changes the conversation. My perspective can be true without being complete. Yours can contradict mine and still hold something I need to understand. That doesn't mean truth doesn't exist. It doesn't mean every behavior is acceptable. It doesn't mean we should give up discernment. It means we can hold our convictions without mistaking them for the whole. And perhaps that's where something like peace begins. Not when we all think alike. When we stop needing our part of the elephant to be the entire animal.

The same window

So I return to that room in Cairo. My friend and I facing the same rubble. For a long time I could tell that story by saying: she saw destruction. I saw rebirth. Now I see something more. I was interpreting too. My way of seeing said as much about me as hers said about her. Maybe the rubble was simply rubble. And maybe it could also become a symbol. Both things can coexist.

That's the place that interests me now. The place where reality doesn't need to lose its materiality to gain meaning. Where a hurricane can be devastating without our having to call it a blessing. Where a loss can still be a loss even if one day we discover something within ourselves because of it. Where someone else's pain doesn't need to be immediately turned into a lesson so that we can tolerate it. And where hope doesn't need to apologize either. We can look at a ruin and cry. We can look at that same ruin and begin to imagine what we'll build afterward. One way of seeing doesn't cancel out the other.

The awakening

Perhaps awakening isn't opening your eyes and finally beholding the whole elephant. Perhaps it's something much humbler. Opening your eyes and discovering that we were always touching only one part. And then doing something revolutionary: asking.

What are you touching? What do you see from where you stand? What happened in your story that makes this reality feel this way? What do you know that I don't? What can I learn without having to become you?

Suddenly, difference stops being a threat. It becomes information. Diversity stops being a slogan. It becomes a human technology for expanding perception. I need your eyes precisely because they aren't where mine are. I need your memory because I didn't live your story. I need your question because I might never have thought to ask it. And you might need something I can only reach from here.

We are not the same. Thank God. We are different perspectives within a reality too large to fit inside just one. Perhaps that's what unity means. Not uniformity. Relationship. Not erasing borders. Building bridges capable of crossing them. Not a single voice. A conversation.

The Nicaraguan under the rain. The Portuguese singing saudade. The Rwandan asking how to go on after the unthinkable. The Chilean living on ground that moves. The Argentinian conversing with their ghosts. The Uruguayan sharing mate in silence. None of them is the elephant. None of them represents their people all on their own. Each one is a life. A window. A possibility of seeing something that, from our position, was hidden. And perhaps the whole elephant only exists in the impossible sum of all those ways of seeing.

That's why I no longer want to see it whole. I want to keep walking around it. I want to listen. I want to touch another part. I want to meet people capable of telling me: from here it feels different. And have enough curiosity to believe them.

Thank you, Nicaragua, for giving me my first window. For the rains on the zinc roofs. For the volcanoes. For the mud. For the small fish appearing in flooded yards. For teaching me that two seemingly opposite things can be true at the same time: water can destroy, and water can bring life.

Thank you to every place I've set foot in for complicating my idea of the world. And thank you to every person whose story has forced me to let go of a certainty that was too small.

Maybe we will never see the whole elephant. But we can do something better than defend to the death the small part we happened to touch. We can join hands around it and start telling each other what each of us can feel. And maybe, together, we can get a little closer.

Myriam V.