I’m often asked how I dealt with leaving my birth
country for this one, especially since I did so as a young adult and not as a
child. I answer—it was difficult to do so, but my situation was quite different
than for many other foreigners here. I was not an immigrant or political refugee looking
for a new life in a better place or an opportunist seeking materialistic gains.
My decision to move was made carefully, but it was made in order to give a personal
relationship that was still a seed, a chance to grow. I knew that if I did not
give it that chance, that I would regret not doing so down the line. At the time
I chose to move to Norway, my life was ready for change—both professionally and
personally. There were a number of factors that came together in a type of
synergy at that time, that made moving here the right thing to do. And over
twenty years later, I can say that I don’t regret having moved from the USA to
Norway since that budding relationship and my life generally changed in ways
that have been mostly positive, challenging, and rewarding. But the past twenty
years have not been a bed of roses either. Nothing good is ever achieved without
struggle and frustration; that I’ve learned. I’ve also learned that nothing is
ever handed to you in this life. At least that has not been the case for my
life. It has rarely, if ever, happened that any road I’ve chosen has been an
easy one initially. We all choose our respective paths to follow. Mine happen
to be strewn with other types of challenges than if I had chosen to remain for
the rest of my life in the town of my birth. If I had done that, I am sure that
I would have faced other types of challenges. But that is not my life story. I had
no idea when I was starting out in the work world that I would end up working and
living in Europe.
The difficulties any foreigner faces when in a new country
have mostly to do with learning the language and trying to understand the new
culture that you find yourself in. Scandinavian culture is not very unlike
American culture in the sense that we enjoy the same things—a materialistic way
of life that does not lack for most things—food, clothing, shelter, vacations,
cars, and luxury items, political freedom, family interest (focus on the
nuclear family mostly), a mostly secular lifestyle, interest in books, movies,
and other media, and many other things. It does not feel foreign to live here as it might have felt had I moved to a poor
backward country or one that was a police state or totalitarian regime. When I go
out to the malls here to shop, I could be anywhere in America at a big shopping
mall. The only difference is the language spoken. So yes, that is a difficulty
and it takes several years to learn to speak a new language. For some it may go
faster; for me it did not. It is the subtleties in any culture—the unspoken
codes of conduct at work and even in social situations, that also make living
in a new country difficult. Some of those codes are impossible to crack, or if
cracked, impossible to understand. I have given up trying to understand some of
them here; I used about ten years doing so and after that I folded. I don’t
think like a Scandinavian from the start point. I would have had to have been
born here for that to have happened. So I believe in myself, in who I am as an
American, am proud of my heritage and my roots, and have truly reclaimed my
identity as an American living in a foreign country, despite all the problems
in America, the crazy politics and politicians, the contradictions, the
inequalities, the disparity between rich and poor, all those things.
Scandinavian societies do not have such disparity between the rich and the
poor, but there are other problems associated with most people having more or
less the same standard of living. It might sound utopian to those who do not
live here; it is not. It leads to an odd kind of social conformity, one that I am
not particularly comfortable with. It also leads to a kind of complacency that
is the result of knowing that the government will take care of most of your
needs.
The biggest difficulty for me in living abroad is not being
able to see my family and friends in the USA as much as I’d like. And even
though I know that I wouldn’t see them all that often if I lived in New York
now, it would be easier to do so because the physical distance between us would
not be large. It is the possibility
of doing so that I miss, perhaps the spontaneity
associated with socializing. My annual visit to New York each year is a well-planned
event; I start preparing for it many months ahead of time. I hope to spend more
time in my country again when I retire; retirement is still years away, but it
is not too soon to plan for it. And I am doing that, slowly but surely, so that
it will be possible to visit with friends and family for longer times.
