Is Expat Life all about the excitement?

Every journey is commonly perceived to have a beginning, middle and end, so much so that we tend to measure, and apply meaning to, our life journeys this way. For the expat, this can be identified with the leaving of somewhere, the experience of being somewhere different, and ultimately the leaving of that place for somewhere else – a nice, neat measurable model surely. Expat life can become a selection of such journeys sandwiched together by life choices and decisions, the first one setting the scene for following-on scenarios. Sometimes the only way for an expat to meaningfully manage such variety in life is to consider each event as a stand-alone one-of-a-kind, only using useful extracted experience from previous journeys to help understand, surmount and successfully navigate the next. In this manner, one lives life as a necklace of choices, events, occurrences and achievements, with a distinct, visible, linear progression, the only constant being the traveller.

But for the vast majority of expats, a new journey is a new beginning, and one which they look to the present knowing, sometimes vaguely, that the end, or a change, will come eventually but not today. Today is for living, for drinking in the newness of life, and doing battle with the new challenges under one’s nose. The mountain to climb is here, now, and with each passing day there is a new vista to enjoy or puzzle out. Every step forward seems to be a step upward. It seems that humans were designed to climb mountains, to relish the challenge, and enjoy the spoils. A new journey will certainly provide this. 

But what happens to the excitement when you are halfway up, and you suddenly get a glance at the plateau ahead that needs traversing to get to the next height? It is a common misunderstanding that all of expat challenges will be heights to scale or mountains to cross. There are plenty of those for you to enjoy, to take your breath away, for sure. But there are plenty of deserts to cross too! Plenty of slow, mundane slogs. Maybe exactly the kind of thing you left home to get away from in the first place? Will your enthusiasm for this new place wane with each dragging footfall across the plain? Are you now too imbued with the addiction to ever-changing, upward vistas that traversing the ordinary is too boring?