One of the amazing things about travel, and more than travel, living in another part of the world is that things are different. It’s what makes cultural adjustment difficult. But it’s also what makes for a rich and three-dimensional experience every day.
While I hated Manila traffic most days, there’s an experience of driving every day where you see things you aren’t used to seeing, you’re hearing things you aren’t used to hearing, and you’re smelling things you aren’t used to smelling. Sometimes, those are tougher moments when you meet a smell your system just can’t seem to adapt to. But it’s an immersive experience that made every day both challenging and rich.
My wife hit a chicken on the road one day taking the kids to school. There were at times carts being pulled by donkeys going the wrong way on the road. The colorful jeepneys that are both menaces to traffic flow, but moving pieces of art that routinely merge sports, movies, and religious culture. I’ll never forget seeing a jeepney decorated with Lebron James, Snoop Dogg, Gandalph, and the mother Mary. As they say, “It’s more fun in the Philippines!”
Over time the sights, sounds, and smells become a part of you. The roosters in the morning, the karaoke across the street at night, the vendors selling a variety of foods at different points in the day on the streets. What is common in one place is more exotic to the one visiting. That sense of newness and adventure never really wore off even though it became more familiar.
One fun moment several years ago we found a piece of wall art in Manila, pictured below, that captured the sense of adventure that we loved in our life overseas. What made me buy it was that it was in Manila, but the image of the art was drawn from my hometown of Long Beach with a view of the Queen Mary. I don’t think these viewing things are still there so it’s probably an older picture. But It was something that spoke to us – that we left that place with that sense of adventure, faith, and risk. We left the “safe harbor” to journey into the unknown for whatever God might have for us. We routinely felt that sense of adventure and risk and it was the backdrop to every day we lived there.
When it comes to this sense of adventure and risk, re-entry back into the U.S. honestly is a bummer. It’s not to judge where we’re from. It’s just familiar. For the most part, it’s predictable. There are ways to get cross-cultural experiences as it’s increasingly a diverse world. But it’s just different. It’s not as immersive. It’s more routine.
There are just as many cultural challenges and risks for those in re-entry. It just seems to be masked a bit in familiarity and without the reward of feeling like you’re living bigger. There’s a real sense of loss that life is getting smaller. We miss the sounds of roosters and trying to avoid chickens and donkeys on the road. We miss the constant reminders daily that “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
There is a danger as people have shared with us about life as an ex-pat or international worker or missionary – that there can be a version of becoming an adrenalin junkie. The need to be in those types of exotic or foreign situations to feel satisfied or to have a sense of meaning or that life is “big” enough to matter. We resonate with that. It was always easy to remember we had “thrown off the bowlines” when the adventure and newness were in front of us every day.
It became part of our identity. Part of what we valued and found significant in our daily lives. When it’s taken away, it adds to the existential crisis and loss of re-entry. How many times have we had moments and days where my wife and I have looked at one another and asked, “Is this it?” or “Is this really my daily routine right now?” It’s not judging, but part of the grieving. It’s asking “How can my life here be meaningful when it was so meaningful there?”
Part of the re-entry process is learning to make these adjustments and learning to “bloom where you’re planted.” That’s the destination of the journey (maybe we’ll get there one day!). But part of me wages war against that. I don’t want to bloom where I’m planted because part of me would rather be planted somewhere else! Or maybe it’s fairer to say it feels limiting and claustrophobic to be planted at all, let alone in a place that feels so familiar and ordinary.
A lot of re-entry tools and training include dimensions helping international workers find ways to maintain global connection and involvement. That seems to be a critical part of the journey, especially for those that lived elsewhere for a long time. It’s a journey and intentional process to try to make room for the “here” and the “there” in your normal rhythm of life. I think we’re still working on how to maintain those connections and maintain that as part of our sense of identity. We still want to live “big” and maybe there are more limitations to how “big” that can be once we’ve been planted back home, but we must “own” how we maintain those experiences moving forward. It’s no longer being facilitated for us when we walk out our front door. We have to move towards it.
It can be a relief to not live day to day with as much risk or cultural stress. But there’s a real loss in feeling like our world, which had felt so big, has shrunk down to size. It’s a challenge to trust God for more opportunities to live big in those ways AND also to have the sight to see how we can live big where we are even if we can’t see what that might look like because it’s disguised in the ordinary or familiar. We sometimes have felt like living overseas “ruined” us from fitting in or enjoying life back home like we used to. But I think it just enhanced our senses and enlarged our hearts. That process doesn’t need to stop. we just need to find ways to maintain some of that as we work to “bloom where we’re planted,” to steward who we are, where we are.
If you haven’t taken some of these types of adventures, look for opportunities to “throw off the bowlines” and “sail away from the safe harbor!” But for those who have had “the trade winds at their sails,” adventures don’t all have to look and feel exotic. Adventures can take place in a lot of places, even at home, even though it may take some intentionality. Sometimes you may have to look for them or be ready for them in new ways!
But of course, we get excited for the next chance to go back!
