Friday, February 3, 2012

The road out


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.

The surreal world we live in

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