You Can’t Go Home Again
Since I have been immersed in the Kon-Tiki culture while collaborating with Torgeir Higraff in writing about his drift voyage experience on a balsawood raft in the South Pacific, it seems fitting to introduce this topic using the wonderful passage with which Thor Heyerdahl began his famous book:
Once in a while, you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.
Similarly, in his words from 2016, Torgeir identifies the exact geographical and astronomical settings where his examinations were taking place:
Alone in the night, I sat down on the sofa that Erik and Ola had made from spare rope, tipped Cuban rum into my coffee, switched off the headlamp, and looked up at the starry sky.
"Beneath me is 4,000 meters of sea and below that a glowing, churning furnace, far down in the interior of the Earth," I thought. "And up there are galaxies with burning gases, several million degrees hot - surrounded by eternal icy cold space"
So, all that remains is one simple question: Where do we go from here? On board a raft, you’d better have a good answer to that question. In life, the same concept applies. Each morning, we wake up in a new world and, simultaneously, in the same old world. Or, for a final excerpt… from one of my early books:
Thought for the day: The past determines the person we are today; but our thoughts and actions today determine who we will be tomorrow.
So… where do we go from here in TEL? Let me dive back into the archives to present another of the early articles about the expat lifestyle and mindset.
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You Can’t Go Home Again
Communications with my friends and relatives in the US and other places around the world remind me – sometimes forcefully – how very different my expat lifestyle is from theirs. Living in another country and, in my case, living in a much larger city than my rural hometown often feels like I am on another planet.
Thor Heyerdahl, the famous Norwegian leader of the Kon-Tiki expedition in the mid-20th Century, wrote of an experience he had as a young man. On his first trip to the South Pacific, he encountered two old Scandinavians who had lived in the islands for years. Here they were, living in paradise – tropical breezes, tropical beaches, tropical fruits and flowers, tropical girls! And what did they daydream about? They missed the gooseberries of their home country! For them, the simple, unglamorous gooseberry had come to represent all of the pleasures from their previous life which were not available in the islands. For me, gooseberries matter not at all. However, I have found no steaks in my new country which match the bacon-wrapped, medium-rare fillets of my favorite steak house in the hometown of my youth. The same is true for the shrimp nachos as they were prepared by my favorite Mexican restaurant. Becoming an expat requires some sacrifices.
However, putting pre-expat memories aside, let’s be a little more objective. As he aged, the American writer Ernest Hemingway famously returned to many of the sites of the adventures from his early years – the glamour of Paris, the bullfight rings in Spain, the safari in Africa, the canals of Venice, the indolent pace of Key West, and the hunting in the mountains of the American West. Invariably, when he returned to those same spots years later, the people were not as funny or heroic or guileless as he remembered. The places were not as beautiful and sophisticated, or charmingly rustic and undeveloped. Everything was changed: the ease and simplicity, the excitement, the food and drink… None were as good as he remembered – and he had hoped to relive. Indeed, he had changed also. He was not as physically strong, not as ruggedly handsome and irresistible to women, and not able to drink all night then, after a productive morning of writing masterpieces, go out to fish or hunt all afternoon. Hemingway himself had declined. Attempts to relive those early experiences brought him more disappointment than pleasure. Despite the advantages of fame and wealth, those original sensations eluded him.
Hemingway never admitted that the charm of a first experience could never be reproduced; this was precisely because they were a first experience, something new and often unexpected. It’s true for all of us, including Hemingway. I confess; it is true for me also. No chocolate will ever be as incredible as my first taste of fine Swiss chocolate after a boyhood filled with American candy bars. No relationship will ever be as sweet, trusting, and innocent as our first love. No current pets could ever match the loyalty, intelligence, and antics of beloved dogs and cats from our past. In my reveries, no steak ever tasted so good, no skies were ever so clear, no fish were ever so willing to bite, no afternoon on the golf course was ever so satisfying, no river was ever so beautiful in the evening, and no friends so humorous as those in my pre-expat life. As I regale my new friends with tales of my old life, they must wonder why I ever considered leaving such an idyllic life to become an expat.
I am determined not to make Hemingway’s mistake. As the saying goes, “You can’t go home again.” Probably, I won’t even try, regardless of how alluring the memories may be. I am quite satisfied with the life I have now. Besides, the folks back home think that I, the expat, am the one with the glamorous and exciting life. And, yes, the steaks in my new town are pretty good, too. Plus, there is the excitement of discovering new taste experiences.
I still haven’t found shrimp nachos as good as the old place in my hometown, though.