Making Peace With Always Being the Visitor

If you only count the years until you belong, you may wait a long time.

By Neil Solomon · 2 min read

Picture a couple named Linda and George who have lived abroad for a long time. They know the market and the bus routes. They still cannot read every sign. At a family wedding next door, they are warmly invited and gently seated near the front. Everyone is kind. Everyone also knows they are not from here.

For years, that bothered Linda. Lately it has bothered her less.

What people seem to describe

I read two small stories that sit close to this feeling.

In Turkey, there is a saying passed between people who have stayed a long time: the foreigners who remain end up buried there. It sounds heavy. To me it describes something settled. They did not become Turkish. They stopped waiting to be anything else.

In Israel, another person describes having limited Hebrew and finding that strangers will read the labels for them. The feeling is gratitude. They never fully fit, and yet people step in without being asked.

I think there are two ways to look at being an outsider. One is as a gap to close. If you only count the years until you belong, you may wait a long time. The other is as a kind of place in the community. A familiar face who is a bit different, and welcome.

Neither is wrong. But I find the second one easier on the heart.

At dinner, George asks Linda, "Do you still wish you had it all figured out?"

"Some days," she says. "But yesterday a stranger read me the label on the medicine. I thanked her. She waved it off."

"That sounds like belonging."

"It sounds like being looked after," Linda says. "I will take that."

Over the years I have come to think that the wish to belong completely is natural, but it can be a trap. The people who seem most at ease are not those who fit in the most. They are the ones who stopped measuring. They know their neighbors, they greet the shopkeeper, and they let the rest be. That is a modest kind of home, and for many it is enough.