I met up with a guy yesterday who is about to embark on a year-long trip to Australia and was seeking a bit of advice. He'd heard from some Estonian acquaintances in Brisbane that Australia wasn't all it was cracked up to be*, so I imagine he was also seeking some reassurance. I championed my homeland to the best of my abilities, which are pretty limited, since he kept asking questions that ended in the words "these days", and since I haven't lived there permanently for the best part of seven years, I really have no idea. He nevertheless seemed buoyed by what I had to say, so the spin I put on it must have been positive enough.
The course of our conversation inevitably led to him asking me why I had come to Estonia, which is still a question I don't have a satisfying response to. You'd think I would seven years after first getting here, but I don't. I admire this guy - Jarkko is his name - for the preparation he is putting in to ensure that everything works out for him, at least in terms of getting himself set up, but it made me realise again how random my decision to come to Estonia was, and how lucky you can sometimes be when a whim pans out.
I've always been a firm believer that things will tend to work out the way you want them to, or at least that things will go as they go and there's not much you can do about it, apart from engineer them. That probably sounds paradoxical and naive by turns, but I don't know how else to express it. When I decided to leave Italy I could have ended up anywhere, but I chose Estonia. I wouldn't go so far as to say it chose me, but whatever the reasons were that I had for coming here - and I honestly can't remember what they were now; a vague interest in the language and a job offer, more or less - it certainly ended up being the right choice.
It could very easily have been the wrong one, I suppose, and in my first month here I did wonder if I'd selected too hastily. But you make your own luck, I think, and from the moment I consciously decided to invest myself in the place I haven't looked back. In that sense I suppose the outlook is good for Jarkko - he's been investing himself in his trip to Australia for quite some time already, and he's not even there yet. He's also very level-headed about the whole thing and not going into it with the bar raised too high, which his friends seem to have done. He'll just take things as they come, rather like I did. I sincerely hope things works out as well for him as they have for me.
*They were shocked that you can't get by on just a T-shirt at night in the middle of winter, even in Australia.
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4 comments:
I think the more important question in your case, Greg, isn't why you came to Estonia in the first place -- I have moved to countless (actually, only 4 places (Alaska, Prague, Tallinn, and Saudi Arabia)) without good reasons, but why you are still there. I know from my experience in Estonia that when they ask why you chose Estonia and you say, "I don't know," they are not amused. However, if you reframe their question to be, "WHy are you still in Estonia?" I think you can give interesting answers to us all.
I wouldn't be amused either, because it's an odd and boring answer, or rather lack of one. "Why are you still in Estonia?" probably is a more interesting question, but I'm not sure my answer - apart from getting into a long-term relationship here - would be any less vague. I made a connection with the place, I suppose.
Oh, here is a perfect stock answer: "I am came to Estonia, and am still here, because I just love Russian-Estonians. There is something so poignant about their plight. Don't you agree?" That would be an endearing answer. Almost as endearing as, "I moved here to learn to speak Russian."
If you want to be as popular as Dr Watson perhaps, yes. Apparently some other loser went to IH recently (you guessed it - from IH Moscow) who was a carbon copy of Dr Watson, bar the running nose he licked clean. He too wanted to come to Estonia because he loved Russian. What a dick.
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