How are you today?

Contemplating my vacant apartment’s bare wall, I ponder my course of action. I’ve just arrived in Canada for an indefinite period with one suitcase. The next day I go to Superstore to buy cutlery, plates, and cookware. When I am paying, the cashier asks, “How are you today?” The question throws me off balance. Beyond checking my well-being, this stranger wants precise information on how I feel today. This is quite a different caliber of interaction to what I am used to in Amsterdam.

So I friendly respond to this unexpected interest and start talking about the nice cookware set I’d just bought, how nice it is to be able to cook again, how I am setting up an empty kitchen, and how settling into a new country isn’t easy, even though Canada is, after all, a Western country, and so on. The people behind me in the queue begin to shuffle, whilst the cashier looks increasingly uncomfortable. I hurriedly brought the conversation to an end. I would soon learn that in Canada, this is a question you don’t answer. On the contrary. You reply with the same question: “How are you?” And with that, the conversation is over.

Throughout my life, not just previously in Canada, the question “How are you?” has been confusing. First, who is asking? How does this person know me? Is he or she a coworker, a neighbor, or someone I know well? Also, just how little do they know me? You rarely reply to a colleague with a detailed account of a sensitive disagreement with your partner.

And then, is the person asking problem-oriented? Is a brief ‘good’ more likely to create a sense of misunderstanding than a connection? And if I bring up a problem, which one should I choose? A big problem, a small problem, or something relatable like ‘I couldn’t find my bike key- which always happens to me on Monday mornings- so I had to take the bus and was late once more.’

Do I actually know how I’m doing myself? I don’t have the faintest idea. With whom are things going well or not? When I try to find something here that offers any certainty, I’m groping in the dark. No wonder the question is so confusing.

These days, I usually opt for a simple answer: “Good!” Things are always good from this perspective here. After all, I exist; I’ve been able to hear the question and I can give an answer. That’s actually rather good, isn’t it?

What a relief not to find anything here that contains even a trace of a person. What a relief not to have to engage in exhaustive mental labour to imagine the picture the other person would have of me. What a relief to be free here from anything of which you can have an opinion. In this boundless freedom, what is here now simply presents itself: water, ripples, ducks, wind, a bobbing sailing boat, a path, dog poo… Perhaps next time someone asks me how I am, I’ll say ‘The sun is warm’, or ‘There’s poo on my shoe’.

Identity is such a strange phenomenon. And people attach so much importance to it that they are willing to kill for it. I invite you to look behind the scenes of identity, together with the authors in this issue of InZicht.