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Bravery and the Irrelevance of Distance
I’ve been told more than once lately that coming to Australia qualifies me as brave. ”I’m not sure I could go thousands of miles away from home for that long—not by myself,” admitted a childhood friend studying in Connecticut. ”You’ve got balls,” said another. ”One of these days, I’m going to try living abroad for a little while. When I finish grad school, maybe.”
Guys, let me tell you a little secret, okay? It’s really not that hard to live in another country. Especially if you’re American.
To be honest, there are some days I feel like I haven’t left at all.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s not the same here. There’s a distinctly Australian way to Properly Get Stuff Done. There are unwritten rules about what not to wear in public if you don’t want to be identified as a non-Australian. There are other unwritten rules about modesty and understatement. You have to get used to a much drier sense of humor. If you’re an introvert, you also have to grow comfortable about often being gently teased by well-meaning people you’ve just met.
I’m not saying that there aren’t cultural differences. But, realistically, it’d be all too easy to insulate myself in the comfort of an all-American world if I wanted to do so.
Thanks to my credit card with the US shipping address, I can still download music off iTunes. I can still watch the Golden Globes on a major television network. I can still read the Washington Post and the New York Times and keep abreast of all the Election 2004 news. When I walk into a bookstore, I can easily buy Madeline Albright’s Madam Secretary, Isabel Allende’s My Invented Country, language dictionaries from the University of Chicago, or any number of American magazines.
The miles just melt away; it becomes far too easy to forget the reality of geography.
When so much of an old and comfortable life is right in front of you, it’s damnably simple to give into the security of what you already know. Perhaps it’s even comforting, after the trauma of a long flight and cultural adjustment. Maybe it even brings a measure of peace, to be surrounded by so many things from home.
But it’s not necessarily brave.
Getting here was only part of it. Alone, it isn’t enough. Nor is having a phone number and a mailbox. No, brave is not so much about living in another country as it is about learning from the experience. It has to do with challenging your perceptions, interacting with a culture entirely on its own terms, and the insights that result. It’s about learning how much society has shaped—and limited—you, and what you’re truly capable of. It’s a willingness to experiment in a city where you have almost no safety net and trusting yourself to live with the consequences.
It’s learning the lessons only being a stranger can teach you.
It’s not easy, but perhaps that’s the point. If it were, there would be no reason to fly all those thousands of miles kilometers; we could just learn it all at home. At least this way our experiences will be especially memorable.