Will You Ever Make it Home?
Ricardo recently made a connection with a member of Lonely Planet’s Long Haul who had written a post that seemed to strike a chord with the readers there. He kindly agreed to adapt it for our blog and we’re pleased to present it to you here.
Most of the time on lifestyle design and travel enthusiast blogs you’ll find a lot of cheer leading for stuffing your 3 shirts in a backpack and taking off to never look back. This is very different and comes from someone who has lived the life so many of us are interested in. It’s something to think about and we feel it’s only right to present as many different experiences to you as possible. Many thanks to Trespassers W for allowing us to use his post.
[adapted from a post by the author on the Lonely Planet’s ‘The Long Haul’ forum]
I used to find The Long Haul’s tagline ‘Don’t know if you’ll ever make it home?’ rather romantic sounding. Actually, I still do. Images of being a citoyen du monde, or a devil-may-care drifter, or member of the jet set, what have you, it’s all exciting sounding. But after just a few years of living overseas, doubts about those rosy interpretations are beginning to creep in. Like many that post on this forum, asking how they too can flee their current lifestyle, I idealized life abroad. But reality is more complicated than I anticipated.
This post is not a complaint, more of a growing realization of what I’ve got myself in to. I’m the equivalent of someone who goes out for a twenty mile hike wearing wingtips and is surprised to find that they have foot issues at the end of the day. Certainly I don’t want to grumble; we are here because we want to be. We still have a house back ‘home’ and two cars (well, more like 1.5 cars by now) are stored in the garage. We could easily return if we wanted to. What’s keeping us here is simply that we want to stay more than we want to move back. So is there a problem?
China (where we live) is not an easy place for a foreigner to make into a permanent home; the difference between cultures is large, it’s hard to integrate, the environment can be demanding. We’re making good progress, studying the language, the children are in public schools, we’ve got driver licenses… but it’s unlikely to match the sense of belonging we would have in more western environs for quite a while. On the one hand, the challenge of living here is part of the appeal. Every day is an adventure. However, I’m finding that the cost of losing a home doesn’t go away just because the benefit of life here is so great. The cost and the profit, the gain and the loss, sit there next to each other, each to be felt in their own ways. I’m sure in time this place can become a home, the path towards that is clear: make friends, become a part of the community, and so on. But the more exhilarating the cultural leap, the hard those steps are to make.
The key word in the forum’s tag line is ‘home’. That question, ‘Don’t know if you’ll ever make it home?’ Does this mean: Will I make this place a home? Will I ever return to my original home? Would it still be home if I did? ‘Home’ at the heart of how most of us define themselves, but moving half-way around the world makes the question ‘what is home?’ difficult to answer.
These are good questions to be confronted with, but they weren’t on my agenda when we moved overseas. Obviously the only answer is, home is where I hang my hat (if I had a hat). But that’s a different type of ‘home’ than the one I left behind. I mentioned that one reason to live here is the desire to face new challenges, to extend ourselves beyond what the old home would allow. But ‘challenging’ isn’t part of how I define ‘home’. Maybe it should be. I’m coming to see that ‘home’ is a concept I need to make for myself, rather than trying to see if this place meets some standard definition of what is a home. Some days that’s easier to say than to do, of course. Hence the post here, I suppose.
Is there any point to this post? I don’t think so, maybe I should delete it. Life is good, and if Allah wills and the levy holds, it may even get better. What I am sure of is that I don’t mean this post to dissuade those looking for a path away of their current homes. It’s human nature: the costs of harboring an unrealized dream are almost always higher than the costs of making that dream come true. It’s not logical, but there it is, it’s part of what makes us human. So come on in, the water is fine (just don’t drink it). And be ready to face some questions you haven’t even envisioned yet.
Photo by: My Hourglass
