No Longer at Ease Here

25/08/2006

“No longer at ease here, in the old dispensation…” The Magi, TS Eliot

In his wonderful poem, The Magi, Eliot imagines what is must have been like for the “three wise men” when they finally got home again. They had followed an amazing star and found the Christ child, but they could only wonder what it all meant. They would have met other peoples and experienced different ways of thinking about the world on their long journey, and all that must have changed their perception of home, Eliot reasons.

How insightful that is, any expat can testify. We go to a new country, make huge adjustments and sacrifices, and then return to our homes, usually very excited. However, that’s when reverse culture shock hits us.

I remember talking to my son about my plans for my first visit back to South Africa. “How are you going to get there?” he asked me about some leg of my proposed trip. It hit me like a thunderbolt. I’d forgotten that there isn’t a constant stream of “convenient” express buses between all South African cities on every day of the week. How could I have forgotten that? How scathing I’d sometimes been about the Koreans’ worship of all that is “convenient,” even at the expense of what is beautiful, for instance. Yet I’d adopted it so thoroughly that I “expected” it back home.

It’s a strange thing we do to ourselves when we adopt this expat life. We become better people, I honestly believe this, by accepting alternate ways of behaving even though we don’t personally adopt them all, but we are trapped in a cycle of shock, hostility, excitement, happiness, adjustment, back to shock and hostility for ever and ever after we have made the move to be expats. When we are away from home and then when we are back home again, we are never completely at ease again in any dispensation. That’s not a bad thing. Our humanity has been stretched and our horizons broadened, but it comes at a price. To be at ease requires a certain blindness, a comfortable familiarity, with the one culture you know. The world is a wide and wonderful place, and so I am happy with my choice no longer to be so well at ease. I wish you strength with your adjustments.

Submitted by Melanie Steyn, approved and celebrated author for kimknightcoaching