Homesickness 3 of 4 (Dr. Brent Lindquist)

Hello again.  Today we’re continuing our look at the heart affliction of homesickness.  Last week we looked at the differences between men and women in honour, if you will, of Valentines Day which is celebrated in the United States and is a holiday, or occasion, where people give each other cards.  I talked about how there are individual differences between men and women as far as homesickness goes and gave some ideas about how to treat that.

This week we’ll continue looking at treating homesickness.  What are some more underlying issues?  Today I will focus on isolation and separation.  You have chosen, by where you’re living and working right at the moment, to take yourself out of your usual story.  I use the word story because I was reading from an editor by the name of Maggie Gallager who was writing about this whole idea of ‘story’.  She says that every human heart hungers to be part of a story to take the disconnected dots of human existence and weave them into a meaningful drama.  That really interests me when I think about our topic today which is homesickness.  If we live in a place that we really don’t know, weren’t born into, sometimes don’t feel we even belong to, we’ve taken ourselves out of our normal stories - our normal histories.  I use the concept of culture, of not knowing the cultural rules before arriving.  Our story is the same problem.  We don’t have anything that we can use it for…  How do we put ourselves into this ‘story’ again, or how do we bring this story to us?  What should we do…go home?  Well I don’t think so.  We have to continue working on the treatment for isolation and separation.  That treatment, for me, means connection. Connection is the treatment for isolation and separation.

How do we connect?  I think we connect in 3 ways.  First of all, we connect in time and space. Secondly, we connect in terms of emotions and thirdly we connect in terms of relationships.  Now, looking at the first one, connecting in terms of time and space…  We connect in time and space with people around us through activities.  We connect in all kinds of things.  I’ve talked about many different ways of connecting. We also connect in terms of the amount of time that we spend with those people around us.  This builds an awareness of their experience.  One of my colleagues, in talking about language learning, said that when you focus on the initial stages of learning you need to focus full-time on language learning.  This is really hard for initial languages learners to take.  They say, ‘My goodness.  I can barely focus on learning something to say out in the community more than a couple of hours and you’re saying full-time which means 8 hours!’ And he said, ‘Yes’.  What he meant, though, was that there are different levels of involvement.  There are different levels of connection. There was the first major part of language learning which focused on the actual involvement with a language coach and learning something to say.  Then there was the second part which was actually practicing.  Then there was the third part which was focusing on indirect things like riding the bus and listening to people talk, listening to the radio, watching television, looking around at what is going on and things like that.  The unintended consequence of all this indirect activity is increasing familiarity. I’m always amazed at how some people accuse me of being well-read and I don’t think I spend much time reading at all. What I do spend time doing is noticing what’s going on around me.  If I surf the internet I look at topics or issues that are important in the marketplace that day and then I learn about it.  Sometimes I just pick up very abstract, discreet or unconnected bits of information but they all work together.  I think my own awareness, and sensitivity to awareness, makes things more real to me and connects me with people around me in better ways.  In terms of connecting in time and space you need to think about activities that you can do that put you in people’s lives, maybe not in their intimate, innermost part of their lives, but at least around them.  That will find, for you, a common place where you can connect.

The second area is connecting in terms of emotions.  This is a little bit harder for an outsider to learn about but I’m amazed at how often we think that people don’t have a range of feelings.  Sometimes we just think that people that are not like us don’t have the same sorts of experiences.  If something bad happens to me do I become anxious and afraid? Yes.  Well if something bad happens to other people, don’t they become anxious and afraid too?  Yes, but sometimes we don’t think about it that way.  How do you find out about how people are feeling in their lives?  The best way is to go back to that concept of surrogate family members and find out how these different feelings are expressed. You may not see particular feelings expressed in ways that you may understand.  What you may think about as being anger may be passion, for example. A lot of people who seem angry, in their own cultural context are not angry so much as it is investment and passion about a particular thing.  You need people around you to help to explain those issues.

Looking at this week, while I’ve been making this program, we’ve been dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in South Asia . Experiences like that are good places for you to understand how people manage, how people put things together, like feelings in their lives.  As you grieve with them you can share with them how you’re doing and how you manage these kinds of things in your own context.  They are probably going to be open to sharing some things with you as well.

I said the third one is connecting in relationship.  It’s very hard to get relationships started if you’re not going to be around people. That seems so obvious on the surface, but under the surface we often expect things to happen without us having to do the work that we normally do back home.  That’s because often the work that we normally do back home is invisible to us.  I don’t often think about the work that it takes me to build relationships at home here. It just happens as a result of being in places, finding out what is similar or dissimilar, talking, and things like that.  Yet, when I go somewhere else I expect that some things are going to happen.  It doesn’t always happen that way.  You need to be connecting in relationships within the mix of feelings and time and space.

It’s kind of hard to hear this particularly if you’re feeling homesick right now, if you’ve got that heart affliction of really wanting to be somewhere else, really feeling down, sad and cut off, but there’s really no easy treatment for this.  It’s not impossible and it can start as soon as I finish my radio program with you.  It can start in the next hour.  It can start tomorrow.  The issue is doing things in small steps, saying to yourself, ‘What can I do tomorrow that can put me in time and space with people?  Can I ride the bus to work instead of driving?  Can I have a coffee break at a different place?  Can I do something with somebody that I wouldn’t normally do?  Will I have any opportunities in the next week to talk to someone about feelings? Can I do anything with the relationships that I have to move them to the next level?’

Talk to you next time!