I’m very much a creature of habit. Well aware of how quickly I fall into a new formulated routine I’ve always tried to take some countermeasures: each time I go grocery shopping I’ve got to buy something unfamiliar and once in a while I read a book on a subject I understand little to none of.
But you know, even that can turn into routine after a while. Sometimes I get tired of throwing away strangely looking and even stranger smelling things out of my fridge and of the way my friends give me those what-on-earth-is-that-looks after having browsed my bookshelves.
Not that I’m easily discouraged. And after all what’s the most radical way to change everything but to move away from whatever life one previously led?
It’s still early days, but even so I’m a little bit surprised about how unspectacular, how smooth around the edges this transition has worked out to be for me so far.
I’m not talking about cultural differences, which are obviously aplenty. I am certainly yet to have a field day with phone services, dating habits, useless electricians and the fact that I still haven’t found a decent Australian Shiraz that won’t blow my modest budget for the rest of the month. But the feeling of being uprooted and misplaced which I’ve dreaded all along has failed to appear.
Does that mean that I have no roots whatsoever?
The point is - I’m not a newbie to the whole process. I was eighteen when I left the country I was born and raised in. It wasn’t a completely voluntary decision, but also one that I never challenged. I wanted to be with my family and if it took me to move two thousand kilometres and bust my throat in a futile effort to pronounce the uvular German “R” properly - who was I to complain?
The first year war brutal.
Neither of us spoke German, but that was the least of my sorrows as I soon realized. For a while I thought that the only way to be understood and accepted was to reshape my own mentality.
Everything about me - my language, my facial expressions, my clothes - it all felt wrong.
It also didn’t help that up to that moment my cultural experiences of the West consisted of a short trip to Sweden, (most of which I spent lying in bed with a 40 C fever, so it didn’t count) and rereading old Burda Moden-magazines.
Gradually I came around to accepting that there will always be things that are bound to escape my understanding: Easter bunnies, Christmassy decorated shelves half a year before X-mas, neighbour arguments about the height of the garden fence, going Dutch with a man that takes you out for a first date.
With the time passing I’ve also learnt to like the way I stood out. Instead of trying to dissolve my self in another mentality I painted my limits brightly red for everyone to see and prided myself at keeping (so I thought) the true me intact.
The temptation of throwing in has never worn off completely. I still let five years pass before I went to Moscow again. What I found back home - and how my friends found me in return - is a different story altogether. As a matter of fact, without even noticing it I have changed so much that many of friends felt estranged and bewildered by the way I saw the world. My perspective shifted, pushing some things I considered of importance out of the frame.
Will it happen to me again?
Sometimes when it took some effort to breathe, I went out for a walk. I counted the steps to the bus stop. Strange as it may seem the same route would take less time each day.
It’s as if at the beginning of our journey every step we take is like groping our way through the darkness, probing the soil under our heels. But as days go by, our feet get used to the bumps on the road and we stop staring down. Instead we raise our eyes as the whole new world unrolls in front of us. How is this world going to treat us?
Does the new environment help to change our personalities? hide them? Or merely reveal them?
I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that the way to the bus stop was a little shorter today.
