There Is No Place Like Home, Unless…
There’s no place like home, unless you don’t have a home—then there’s no place like exploring the depths of eternity. Roaming back roads, searching for meaning beyond what society considers normal. A meaning that pushes you to the edge of discomfort, with one foot dangling off the symbolic cliff, leading to a sharp point of clarity. A rush that’s startling, painful, yet worth it, because it shifts your perspective so profoundly that you’ll never see things the same again.
Recently, I met a woman during my travels who embodied this kind of roaming spirit. Homeless by choice, she had once been an engineer for a large, influential corporation in D.C. until she decided that wasn’t the life she wanted. Now, she surfs couches, books tickets to Africa, takes long train rides across America, and dreams of heading to Iran and Russia—not because of their current climate, but for the experience. She’s smart, deeply in tune with things most of us take for granted. She questions what we never even think to challenge. Oh, and she’s lived without a cellphone for the past five years.
“I constantly don’t know what time it is. I’ve missed a lot of flights and trains because of it,” she told me when I asked what life was like without being tethered to a phone.
“In all seriousness, it’s tough to do the simplest things like banking or booking a hotel room. Some places won’t even let you reserve a room unless it’s done online.”
When I asked what inspired her to go without a phone, she simply said she kept losing them. No one stole them—she just misplaced them. But as we dug deeper into the conversation, she admitted it all started when Facebook locked her out of her account after her phone number changed. She lost all her photos from years of travel. She was heartbroken, angry, and frustrated with a system that didn’t care. So, she said, “Screw it.”
“I do miss having photos of the things I’ve done,” she confessed. She had just attended Burning Man as a volunteer. She described it as a profoundly challenging experience that you can’t fully prepare for. “Everyone has their own burn, and it forces you to look at yourself in ways you never imagined.”
The harshness of living in a desert, where even plants can’t survive, is extreme. You have to communicate with your community to get through it. It forces you to break habits you didn’t even realize you had.
“I haven’t done anything that’s scared me in a long time,” I admitted. My past is full of extremes, but as I entered my 30s, I started living comfortably. I clung to that comfort, not wanting to face the pain of being out of my safe space. Yet, I know that nothing is truly learned in comfort. I lose the chance to explore what makes me tick, what makes life work, and what else there is to experience. I used to thrive in that invigorating state of not knowing how things would turn out. Now, I’m terrified of not having a detailed schedule to follow.
I crave control—over my future, my present, my feelings, my mindset. And in that process, I’ve lost the most beautiful, childlike part of myself: my curiosity.
What if I became curious about the fear and pain associated with letting go? Instead of resisting it, what if I leaned into that discomfort and asked what it had to teach me? So often we shy away from pain, fearing it will consume us. But what if, in facing it, I discovered a kind of liberation I’ve never known? What if the act of letting go wasn’t a loss, but a path to something greater—an unraveling that leads to wholeness?
What if the fear of losing control is actually holding me back from the very freedom I seek? We cling to expectations, thinking they’ll keep us safe, but what if they’re the chains that keep us stuck? Letting go means stepping into the unknown, and that’s terrifying. But what if, instead of seeing the unknown as something to fear, I saw it as a vast expanse of possibility?
And if I do let go—of control, of expectations—what would that say about me? Would it mean I’m weaker for surrendering, or would I finally be strong enough to trust that I don’t need to have all the answers? What if in letting go, I didn’t lose myself, but finally discovered who I am without the constant pressure to hold everything together? Maybe the person I’ve been trying to control is only a fraction of the person I’m meant to be.
What if the pain I’ve been so afraid of was just a passage—a necessary threshold I need to cross in order to evolve? Instead of running from it, what if I embraced it as a teacher, guiding me to a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me? Perhaps letting go isn’t an ending, but the beginning of a new way of being—a step toward discovering a life that is not dictated by fear, but by openness, curiosity, and trust in the process.
Letting go doesn’t mean losing ourselves.
I’m grateful to the woman who shared her story with me over the course of four hours, as we watched Colorado’s landscapes drift by from the observation car. Her words were a wake-up call, reminding me that life is both too short and too long to live it safely on the sidelines.
