Transplants, Time, and the Stranger Within

When we first wrote about living abroad, we described the experience as a kind of transplanting: uprooting from familiar soil and learning to grow in a new cultural ground. We also noted similarities between transplanting and aging. Both migration and aging confront us with the loss of taken-for-granted fluency. In a new country, even ordering coffee or catching a joke requires conscious effort. With aging, the body and social roles we once inhabited without thought begin to demand renegotiation.

Alfred Schutz, in his essay The Stranger, discusses how outsiders must explicitly learn what insiders assume. Later theorists of sociocultural models (TSCM) describe this as the accumulation of cultural “recipes” — scripts for how to act, speak, and belong. Massie and Staude, in their phenomenology of ageing, show that growing old is also an accumulation: of biological rhythms, personal narratives, and historical time. Both processes force us to confront our own strangeness in the world. We wrote Transplants: Notes on Aging and Living Abroad before discovering these references and were oddly delighted to find our observations mapped onto a much larger conversation.

Living abroad, we find ourselves caught between languages and identities, neither fully at home nor fully foreign. Aging, too, places us in a liminal space: still ourselves, but transformed, negotiating continuity and change. To be a transplant is to be a stranger; to age is to become a stranger to oneself. In both cases, the task is not to erase difference but to learn how to live meaningfully within that strangeness.

Learning to Laugh Again

One of the first signs of being a stranger abroad is missing the punchline. Humor depends on shared references, rhythms, and cultural cues. In Italy, we’ve often found ourselves smiling politely while others laugh, only later realizing the joke hinged on a pun or gesture we hadn’t yet absorbed. Schutz would say that insiders rely on “recipes,” while the stranger must consciously accumulate them. Each missed joke becomes a tiny research project, a reminder that belonging requires deliberate learning.

Aging works in a similar way. Massie and Staude describe aging as the intertwining of biological, narrative, and historical time. Just as the migrant must relearn cultural cues, the aging person must relearn bodily ones. A staircase once climbed without thought now requires calculation. A word once recalled instantly now hovers just out of reach. The fluency of youth — cultural or physical — gives way to slower, more deliberate accumulation.

Visibility and Invisibility

Living abroad, our accent marks us as visible. Even when we blend in with clothing or gestures, a single phrase betrays us. At the same time, there are moments of invisibility: when locals dismiss us as not quite part of the conversation, or when our cultural references simply don’t register. Schutz’s stranger is caught in this paradox, both hyper-visible and overlooked.

Aging carries a similar paradox. Wrinkles, slower movement, and retirement make one visible as “old,” yet at the same time older people are rendered invisible in social life. Massie and Staude call this a form of “social death,” where retirement or frailty shifts identity from agent to dependent. In both migration and aging, visibility and invisibility are intertwined experiences of being marked as other.

Negotiating Identity

In our earlier blog we wrote of being “neither fish nor fowl,” caught between American and Italian identities. Aging, too, produces hybrid identities. We remain ourselves, but transformed. Looking at an old photograph, we see someone who is both us and not us. We are looking at stranger we once were. Schutz’s phenomenology of the stranger and Massie and Staude’s analysis of aging converge here: identity is not a fixed essence but a negotiation across time and culture.

The Strange Shape of Time

Living abroad has made us aware of all sorts of unfamiliar rhythms — how people speak, joke, gesture, or structure conversations. But aging brings its own unexpected rhythm, one that doesn’t have much to do with culture and everything to do with time itself.

We came across a study from Yorkshire (Degnen) that stayed with us. The older adults in it didn’t tell stories in neat, chronological order. Their conversations wandered comfortably between decades, past and present sitting side by side as if they had always belonged together. Details that younger listeners might dismiss as “irrelevant” carried their own meaning — a kind of shorthand built from a lifetime of associations. And sometimes the pace of these stories drifted free of what others expected, unfolding in their own logic.

It struck us because it felt familiar. Living abroad has its own version of nonlinear time — moments when the past intrudes unexpectedly, when old habits collide with new contexts, when identity refuses to stay in sequence. Aging just makes this temporal looseness more visible. Perhaps both experiences reveal that time is less of a straight line and more of a shape we grow into. We are invited to embrace nonlinearity.

When Time Stops

We were thinking about this recently as we finished Book Three of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. Its protagonist, Tara, becomes a stranger not because she relocates, but because time itself stops for her. She wakes each day into the same date while the world continues around her in ways she can sense but not join. Tara must relearn the “recipes” of this new condition — how to navigate relationships, routines, memory, and meaning when chronology refuses to cooperate.

Reading her while thinking about migration and aging, we realized that strangeness is not only spatial or bodily. It can also be temporal: a sudden shift in the rules by which life proceeds. Tara’s halted time echoed something we were already feeling — that belonging, at any age, is partly the work of adapting to a world that will not stay still, or in her case, will not move forward.

Toward a Philosophy of Transplants

To live abroad is to transplant oneself into new soil. To age is to discover that the soil itself shifts beneath us. Both experiences demand humility, patience, and creativity. They remind us that cultural or bodily fluency is never permanent. We are always accumulating, relearning, renegotiating. Migration and aging, then, are variations on a theme: becoming a stranger and learning how to inhabit that strangeness.

Living Meaningfully Within Strangeness

To migrate is to discover that the familiar world has become foreign. To age is to discover that the familiar self has become foreign. In both cases, we are transplants — uprooted from the soil of fluency and asked to grow again in uncertain ground. Schutz’s stranger reminds us that belonging requires conscious accumulation of models. Massie and Staude remind us that aging reshapes time itself, expanding the past and narrowing the future. Our own experience abroad reminds us that these processes are not failures but invitations: to relearn, to renegotiate, to live deliberately.

A line from that Yorkshire study keeps echoing for us: older adults aren’t “lost in the past” at all — the past simply moves more freely through their stories, another thread in the weave of lived experience. What can look nonlinear or “irrelevant” from the outside is often just a different way of stitching moments together. That image stays with us. It suggests that strangeness, whether cultural or temporal, isn’t a deficit but another kind of knowing, a rhythm shaped by the layers a person has lived through.

Perhaps this is the gift hidden in strangeness. Migration and aging strip away the illusion of permanence. They reveal identity as a rhythm of continuity and change. To be a transplant is to accept that roots can grow in new soil. To age is to accept that roots deepen even as branches bend. In both, the task is not to recover lost fluency but to cultivate meaning in the midst of difference.