During my 22 years on this planet, I have managed to live in 3 different countries, 4 different cities and probably about 10 different apartments/houses, so needless to say change has been a constant medium.
You would think that after moving so much I would be used to change? Unfortunately no, I think I am more stressed about change now, as compared to when I was younger because I can understand and process a lot more than before and can guide my own decisions which has its own problems.
Although in the last few years, I've realized that change can mean many things and can include new medical conditions, new friends, growing up, starting a new program, parents job insecurity, house renovations, tenants, and learning to deal with patients and internalizing their own problems. It is hard to deal with any one of those problems separately, but when those problems get combined together in a 3 month period, needless to say stress is the only thing that is constant.
I am jealous of stability, I am really jealous of people that live in one place for their whole lives, get to know their neighbourhood, develop friendships and relationships. For some reason everyone always thinks the grass is greener on the other side until that is they cross to the other side. Let me tell you there is nothing glamorous about constantly having to move, and adjust your life, it sucks.
Now, the constant change that my life revolves around is my program, where every week we have different quest lectures, different labs, and different clinical sessions and of course the ever changing commuting of 2 hours per day. What the profs don't realize is our brain cannot process and remember an infinite amount of information and eventually stops accepting new information. But of course from their perspective everything is important, since we might decided to work in apparently 20 different fields at the same time and should know a bit about everything. To me that logic is definitely flawed since we end up not being competent in anything.
On the other hand, some people do love it though, or at least get accustomed to it a lot more than me. Due to globalization and easy air travel, people can easily move from one country to another in a matter of hours, and if they are allowed can stay for a few years, and then move on to another country. This is sort of what is occuring in Europe, with the collapse of the economy of Ireland, Greece, Iceland, and eastern europe countries such as Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, and other countries.
The young people from these countries realize that there are no jobs and no future and therefore they get a visa, get on a plane and travel to other countries to live and work such as Australia, England and Canada. I have had the pleasure of living with some of them, and it truly is inspiring how determined and how appreciative they are of some of the things we take for granted. Some have nothing but yet, are happier than a lot of other I know that seem to have everything. The weird thing, is to them it is not strange to constantly new and some find it exciting to see these new places and then move to another place.
In a way, the olden days of living in one spot for the rest of your life are gone, since people move to other cities/countries for school, work, marriage and any other host of reasons to other countries and the world has definitely shrunk in the past 30 years since travel and borders have been opened. In addition back when we were hunters and gathers, nobody lived in one place anyway, and people migrated with the animals since that was their livelihood.
I think, the people from eastern Europe have the right idea, that life should be looked as a series of adventures instead of problems, and every setback is just another adventure or chapter in a book that leads you to discover more about the world and broadens your outlook about life in general.
I've lived in 2 different countries. I think change is good. It gives you perspective on stuff that other people who have been in the same place their whole lives don't have. Tho I often do wonder what it's like to be part of only one culture. It would make life simpler, but probably also less interesting.
ReplyDeleteYeah I also wonder about being part of one culture...Being part of three cultures is sometimes really confusing for others and for myself too. I often feel like I don't really fit in anywhere and even though I've lived in Canada for 14 years, I still don't feel Canadian.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny, because I actually gave up trying to explain to people that I'm not Eastern European since its too confusing for them, since in their mind, if someone is from Poland they're polish, and its hard to explain the difference between nationality and religion.