Serendipity is an unexpected stroke of good fortune that leads to a happy discovery. It showed up on a recent early morning as I was walking my dog along the backwater of the Arkansas River Trail.

I was listening to "Travel with Rick Steves" on public radio as Savannah cheerfully investigated scent-based clues left by other creatures that had ventured that way before us. Although I'm not a big fan of Steves' radio show--it can be annoying to hear affluent professional travelers advise us plebeian listeners that we can experience another culture during a visit as "short" as three weeks, when many of us are fortunate to get out of town for a weekend--I was intrigued by what his guest, Euny Hong, was saying about nunchi.

Nunchi is a Korean concept describing the ability to observe and gauge the moods of other people, a skill important to the way people get along with one another and one that can be especially useful when experiencing cultures different from our own.

Americans might equate nunchi with "reading the room," but it goes further. It means adjusting yourself to what is happening around you without anyone needing to tell you what to do: noticing who is speaking and who is holding........

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