Very shortly it will be my 5th anniversary of landing on Canadian soil. Five years ! I just can't believe how quickly time has flown by. Feels like only yesterday I was at Toronto's Pearson International Airport on a wintery day, waiting in line to have my landing papers scrutinized by an Immigration officer. Looking around the terminal I was surprised as to how many other new immigrant arrivals were here in the big country for the first time...each carrying their dreams and hopes of a new better life. Many people have different reasons for changing lands...some reasons are economic, others are emotional. I will not talk about my reasons, suffice to say that having accepted the challenge, the day I posted the application papers - than that became my Mount Everest, my aim, my peak to climb.....
On each anniversary of arriving in Canada, I open up a new page in my diary and write how I feel. This is what I wrote in 2001, one year after landing in my new country:
On the experience of emigrating...
As I live out my daily existence here in this urban landscape somewhere in Ontario, trying unsuccessfully to perfect my new North American accent (ie. putting a double 'R' sound into every word I say) and having to remember to drive on the other side, I sometimes get hit by waves of nostalgia for the shores I left behind. One misses the sights and sounds of a world that was so familiar, so intimately entwined in one's consciousness from birth to adulthood.
Changing countries definitely alters your perspectives on life. Initially, you judge everything by reference to the social and cultural benchmarks of your previous existence. Consequently, some things appear better, others worse. Some are more prepared for the initial disorientation, others less so. Personally, I've tried to alter my own mental parameters - the levels of expectation I assume from daily activities. Sometimes it helps to just "go with the flow", even if that flow appears to be edging towards a waterfall. I no longer ascribe value judgements to my new country's method of doing things....I just observe and try to understand....
Somebody once said something like "to discover new worlds you need to lose sight of the shore". This and other such profound statements I occasionally come across, help to rationalize and provide a positive insight to my own and others' reasons for being here.
Well, I'm starting to understand Canadian humour (I barely twitched a facial muscle in my first six months), and no longer mind getting tailgated at 120 kph - so things are definitely looking up....
No comments:
Post a Comment