I read an interview the other day that stuck with me, the way a good porch conversation does. The Costa Rican News sat down with an American fella who moved down there, married a Costa Rican woman, and somewhere along the way quit seeing the world the way he used to. You can read the whole thing here, and I reckon it's worth your coffee break.

Now I've never lived overseas. Closest I've come is a fishing trip to Canada that got rained out half the week, and even that changed me some. But I've spent enough time on back roads to know what this man is talking about. You learn a place through your windshield and your boots, and when you stay somewhere long enough, the place starts working on you right back.

What got me about his story is how the big changes snuck in through the small ones. It wasn't some grand epiphany on a mountaintop. It was learning how his wife's family does things, how the neighbors measure time, what counts as urgent and what doesn't. Anybody who's been married a while knows marriage teaches you plenty about another person's way of seeing things. Marry into a whole other culture and the lessons come double.

Down there they've got a saying, pura vida, and if you've spent any time around Costa Ricans you've heard it. Simple life, pure life, take it easy, it's all right. It's a greeting and a philosophy and a shrug all rolled into two words. Us Americans, we tend to measure a day by what we got done. Folks down there lean toward measuring it by who you sat with, whether you took a minute to talk. I'm not saying one is right and the other's wrong. I'm saying it does a man good to learn there's more than one ruler in the drawer.

And that's really what the interview gets at. Living somewhere else, actually living there and not just vacationing through it, rewires the questions you ask. This fella talks about coming to understand the culture from the inside, through his wife and her people, instead of from the outside looking through a resort window. That's the difference between visiting a place and being adopted by it. Big difference. Same as the difference between driving through the Ozarks on the interstate and pulling off down a gravel road where the creek crosses low. One gets you there faster. The other gets you somewhere.

My buddy moved to Arkansas years back and it took him a solid two years to quit being a Chicagoan about everything. The pace, the small talk at the feed store, waving at trucks on the county road. He fought it, then one day he didn't anymore. Reading this interview, I suspect the same thing happened to that man in Costa Rica, just with better weather and fruit I can't get at my local grocery.

Tell you what though, it's got me thinking about my own blind spots. I've got my Ozarks run coming up this fall, and I've driven those roads so many times I could do half of them with my eyes shut. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe it takes a man who learned to see a second country to remind the rest of us to look harder at the first one.

Go read the interview. Then take the long way home tonight and see what you notice.