Inspiration.
The United Nations International Migration Report 2013 revealed that around 232 million people live abroad in 2013. This article is for you, if you somehow landed in a foreign country and stayed there for a longer period. This article is for you too, even if you are not living abroad, because it deals with life’s challenges, lessons and key discoveries.

I have wanted to write about my life abroad for a long time, but I didn’t feel the right burst of creativity until I read this nice article by Russell V. J. Ward called: 4 Ways Living Abroad Changes You… Forever. His words triggered the sort of inspiration I needed to finally sit down and do it. Not to mention how much a rainy winter night helps.

Sometimes we wonder if our decisions are right and examine our lives looking for some meaning. When I go back to my country of origin to visit my family and friends, people would ask me two main questions: when I am coming back and whether or not I miss what I somehow left behind. These sort of questions, plus seeing how people move on with their lives, get married, start having children and buy apartments, made me wonder for several years if the path I had chosen was the right one. I permanently asked myself if I had found meaning and purpose every time I moved or changed directions.

People at home continue with their lives and one feels very often as a black sheep, as an outsider. I would even start telling myself that I was just being rebellious, that I just took the decision to escape from the ineluctable reality. So in a deep way, moving abroad was an effort to discover my calling and my true purpose in this world. It has been an endless search for my true passions and an exploration of the possibilities that life and the planet has to offer me in professional, personal and spiritual terms. I wanted development and expansion, so I went far away for it.

Changes and Challenges.
In a way, what Russell says is totally true. Living abroad brings you tons of new lessons and the impact in your life is giant. I could write thousands of stories with all the adventures, endings, beginnings, romances, accidents and funny moments that I have lived. It is a tale of survival as well. The environment is sometimes harsh and the only way to go through all of it is by upgrading yourself.

The new experiences are a huge boost to your tolerance, resilience and your value system. You often realize how people create problems in their minds out of nothing, how relationships are broken because of details, how to accept different points of view, or how to better listen, because you stop taking things for granted. You also learn how to appreciate the important things in life, like friends, family, the environment, your health and love.

In a very literal way, moving abroad is like starting college again, specially if you move to a country without having a clue of the language. You need to learn so many things to be able to achieve something. It is not only the language, but also the social codes and behaviors. Getting a feeling of belonging is a slow paced process. You basically need to start again in so many ways.

The previous level.
So, have I found my calling and true purpose? Have I found meaning? It is hard to answer those questions. Not because I don’t know the answer, but because the questions are wrong. That is my intention with this article. We often look for things outside ourselves to feel better. We long for the special person, job, promotion, house, holiday and so many other things in the outer world, that we forget to see things how they really are. We are waiting for that special thing to happen that will change our lives. When that thing finally comes, we experience a long period of satisfaction and we feel great. Indeed. We meet that special one and we are happy, but after a while, things change back to that state of agitation and restlessness and we split up.

Living abroad has been one of the most important decisions of my life. It has helped me to be self-aware and to realize life’s deeper purpose.

Many times during my stay in a foreign place I have felt like living in a movie. As if I was some sort of entity observing the movie of my life or an entity “being the reality”, like a plant. This situation has had a profound and powerful impact inside me. I just didn’t realize it before. I guess this state of contemplation happened because my mind was so busy trying to understand my environment and was also so busy processing a huge amount of information, that I was just unable to do anything else than to live the present moment. As I said, like a plant.

To give our fullest attention to what we are doing now is the deeper purpose, because we can only live in the present moment. The rest, the future and past, is all our imagination or our emotional and mental luggage. By doing that, by living in the present, we live the path and we connect with our inner self. That is why all questions related to a final destination are wrong, because there is no path to find. We build our path every single moment of our lives and thereby we recognize our calling. Of course, that doesn’t mean we cannot plan the future. But if we start living in that future, if we start worrying, we come back to that state of dissatisfaction and we start waiting again for that special thing to come.

The next question would be something like: am I doing right now what I really want to do? I guess that is a question of passions and deserves another article. At least we can realize that the answer is not out there, but somewhere in that inner world.

By the way, regarding that question or any other without an answer, I heard once a master piece of advice:

“There is one important rule, you can not tell about yourself ‘I don’t know’, your thoughts and what you do come from you and you always know something important about them. Even if you don’t know, guess it, because even guessing comes from you and it is a way of knowledge about yourself.”