On your first journey beyond the Western World even routine situations will flummox you. You cannot avoid these gopher holes despite prior study and meticulous planning. If you stay gone long enough — exposing yourself nakedly and with bravery — hard experience will shatter preconceptions, adding a new and more spacious dimension to your character. I share two early photographs taken on my virgin trip to the Middle East.

On landing at Istanbul I needed the bathroom facilities. As I washed my hands I noticed a circle in vivid red slashed by a diagonal — the international symbol forbidding a specific piece of human behavior. The colored glyph overlaid an iconic rendering of a human foot, its toes floating stylized and detached as if in a cartoon. I could not decode this immediately. I first looked for a surface upon which walking might be prohibited and found none. I read the text but remained befuddled. I did not know what masjid meant. (It translates: mosque.) Ablution is a word rarely used in the United States, so I had just a vague sense it might attach to a religious observance. I went looking for the masjid and found two of them, segregated by sex like the bathrooms. Approaching the female sanctuary, I sensed beyond a curtained doorway the thick atmosphere of intensely private activity, prompting me to retrace my steps gingerly back to the arrival hall.

Psychologists use a discomforting phrase: ‘feelings of unreality.’  It describes I think the beginning of a major re-configuration of your Self. I was having those peculiar feelings. I had seen men shave in public restrooms, and brush their teeth, but never saw a man wash his feet in an airport sink. Apparently it is enough of a problem the authorities must expressly ban the conduct. In subsequent months I found men cleansing their toes, ears, mouth and face in public a commonplace occurrence everywhere in the Muslim world; men kneel and pray on the sidewalk, in packed train stations, anywhere they find themselves when the time for worship arrives. I took the photograph below at a mosque used continuously over the past four hundred years. Notice the footrests of hard stone, worn smooth and round by male feet propped up to receive millions of ritual washings.