Costa Rica is An Event-Focused Society

I guess I could be accused of being somewhat of a “Pollyanna” when it comes to Costa Rica. I mean even the name of my old blog, 365 Reasons I Love Costa Rica, used to invoke nausea in some of my less optimistic perusers.

I mean, some of you are probably thinking, come on Costa Rica Guy, isn’t there anything you don’t love about the place?

Well, my answer to that is sure one can always find things not to like anywhere.

But why focus on those things?

What joy does it bring to your life to focus on the negative?

Anthony Robbins (the motivational guy with the big teeth), whose teachings helped give birth to my unbridled optimism, often does a little exercise where he tells people to find everything in the room that is brown. Then he will have you close your eyes and tell him all the stuff in the room that is green and red and orange and blue, etc. Generally no one can remember those things because their focus was only on the brown…

Ah ha, you see the moral of the story is why would one want to go around focusing only on the brown…

the so-called “feces” of life, when there are so many vibrant and beautiful colors.

That is certainly true here in Costa Rica.

So, to get back to the topic of today’s post, I am writing about an aspect of culture here in Costa Rica that can sometimes be humorous and other times be maddening…just to please those potential readers out there who demand to hear about something that could have a tinge of negativism.

And that is the fact that Costa Rica is an event-focused society. Or, at least the the culture here tends to be “event-focused” to a far greater extent than what most North Americans will be accustomed to.

What is an “event-focused” society you ask?

The best way for me to describe it is with an example.

Take a minor fender-bender for instance. When that happens in the middle of one of San Jose’s busiest intersections, guess what occurs next? The two vehicles involved remain precisely in the position of the accident for hours while they wait on the INS guy (the national insurance company) to arrive on his moped to inspect and assess damages…

In the meantime, the largest traffic jam in the history of the world is occurring, but the principal players in the accident, the drivers, the police and, of course, the INS guy, remain completely oblivious to what is going on around them. I mean women are giving birth in cars and shit.

Why?

Because of their intense focus on the event…the minor fender-bender.

Why don’t they just move the damn cars out of the road?

Because in an event-focused society one does not take action to alleviate the repercussions, or aftershocks, simultaneously occurring due to the event. One remains focused exclusively and intently on the event itself.

Another example are the many fairs (or ferias in Spanish) that take place everywhere seemingly every weekend. It seems that there’s no thought whatsoever put into planning in order to alleviate the havoc that closing off every single potential ingress and egress has on people that need to get from point A to point B.

Why?

Again, because it is all about the event, the feria. What is happening on the periphery of the event is never of any importance in an event-focused society.

I could provides scads of additional examples showing that Costa Rica is an event-focused society. Such as the habit almost all ticos have of stopping their cars, literally in the middle of the road, putting their flashers on, and carrying on a cell phone conversation, or whatever “event” that motivated them to stop…

Of course there are also advantages to this event-focused-ness in that it can make some events all the more engaging.

So there you have it, a “potential” negative about my beloved Costa Rica.

Satisfied?!

What can you do about this phenomenon that Costa Rica is an event-focused society?

Absolutely nothing, but sit back and just chuckle to oneself. It is the culture here and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles in Costa Rica.

My advice is to just smile and “focus the green.”

Pura Vida!