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Traveling and the Ambiguity of “Home”
So I guess this is life. A constant stream of people and places, entered and exited. But maybe it’s not so much about who as what they leave behind. What they reflect or expose about us. The wounds we’ve neglected to properly heal that keep opening. A void we seek to fill but expect others to anticipate. I often think of relationships as an unspoken exchange. A projection of one’s needs onto another person that makes sense at the time but is never permanent. Like everything.
If you’ve read previous articles here, you’ll notice a trend in the Why We Teach and Travel series. These small insights are part of a longer, recurring conversation I have often, with friends, family, and people I meet who share a similar sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere. Maybe from selecting a lifestyle that means home, in the physical sense, doesn’t exist as traditionally defined. So my question for you is: why do you teach and travel?
The Everywhere
Travel is seen as expansion. And it is. Your world opens, absorbing more than ever possible in one place. I’ve had my head stitched in Thailand, lived on a beach in Malaysia, disconnected in a rural ashram in India, and built routine and communities in different places, adapting to a new normal with what was available.
Travellers get this. The commonality that one home doesn’t exist. It’s not sad. But humbling. That our world is so much greater than the borders and birth certificates that define our place. The problem, if you can call it that, is that once the world opens, it doesn’t close again. You outgrow your birthplace but struggle to replicate the feeling of home because you’ve become a foreigner everywhere, including where you started. And, what constitutes “belonging somewhere” feels vague and undefinable. You can live somewhere for years and still be asked, but where are you really from?
The Nowhere
Travel is also constant loss. I think it’s not often talked about because we gain so much simultaneously. This joy has a low. When you leave, or they do. And this is inevitable; not as something to grieve, but as proof that something real existed. People move on, places change, and so do we. When you outgrow people or a place because your priorities and desires change. And they do.
I was born just outside of Toronto, Ontario. A suburban grid of identical brick houses, mowed lawns, and ice rinks. I left over a decade ago and have spent most of those years elsewhere. Australia, Indonesia, Brazil. Returning home is always humbling and polarizing. You’re a visitor in your birthplace yet navigate on autopilot. The streets are familiar but the version of you that belonged to them isn’t. You’ve outgrown the place without being fully claimed by anywhere else. It’s a specific kind of displacement.
Something lingers across borders, decades and time zones and it never changes. Despite longevity or how fluently you order coffee in an non-native language, roam foreign streets, or effortlessly exist, the question remains: where are you from? As if origin is fixed and leaving is a temporary detour to eventually correct.
More than travel, anyone who has experienced loss might also relate. When we love and lose someone, it impacts another sense of home entirely. And the feeling of not quite belonging anywhere, in the way the question where are you from assumes you can only exist somewhere specific, your birthplace.
I wrote the excerpt at the start of this article as a reminder when I feel this loss. Because the other thing worth remembering is that the rational and emotional brain can exist together. I can understand why something is happening and equally feel the weight of it. Discomfort teaches us about ourselves, including listening to our needs and when it’s time to move on.
The Anywhere
With each experience, I distinguish between my desire for belonging and the reality that achieving the acceptance I crave is entirely my responsibility. Nature versus nurture. Nature is constant change and movement, and nurture is how I show up for myself. The love I understood as external was only ever mine to create and give.
“For more and more of us, home has less to do with a piece of soil than a piece of soul.” - Pico Iyer
Travel writer Pico Iyer describes the modern nomad not as someone without roots but as someone whose roots are internal. The places matter less than what you carry. I don’t think the search for home through movement is avoidance, though sometimes it looks like that from the outside. I think it’s something else. The acknowledgment that the version of home you were assigned at birth doesn’t always fit. Home is a feeling more than a location. Belonging is personal and changing.
I left ‘home’ young. Spent my twenties in Australia, moved to Brazil, learned an entirely foreign language that is now my second. None of it was linear and much of it was uncomfortable. But I did it. All of it. And what that teaches, more than anything, is that we are far more capable than we give ourselves credit for when we stop waiting for external conditions to feel right first.
I respect people who do hard things. Who exit places and situations that don’t align. Who leave the careers they thought were mandatory for success to pursue something more fulfilling. Teaching yoga is part of this. At its core, the practice asks you to sit with yourself long enough to become someone you actually like. And when it really comes down to it, that is home.
This is part of why practice matters. Not as escape. But as the one place where the question of origin becomes irrelevant.
I sit unsolved, unfussed about unsolicited input and satisfied with being undone. I’m not sure belonging, in the traditional sense, is what I’m after anymore. As long as I feel like I belong in the person I’ve become.
What I’ve come to is something less resolved and more liveable. It’s never too late to find a different kind of home, to experience life somewhere entirely new, to become someone you didn’t anticipate. The only condition is internal stability, knowing yourself well enough that the ground beneath you is yours regardless of where you’re standing.
So the question is not where are you from, but where are you now?
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