Every Place Is My Home

Why I was never scared of getting lost during 9 months in Asia

During a solo road trip from New Jersey to Wyoming, I lost my truck in a massive Chicago parking garage.

I spent close to an hour walking around and around, up and down the different levels, desperately trying to locate it in what seemed an endless hellscape of grey concrete. That hideous, nervous nausea increased with each minute that passed, each bend I anxiously walked around only to see another hundred cars that were not mine. It also didn’t help that it was December and absolutely freezing.

Needless to say, I finally found my truck—but the experience stuck with me, especially as I looked toward my “big trip:” an open-ended, solo backpacking journey through Southeast Asia and eventually India.

I thought back to every Indiana Jones movie I’d seen, every depiction of some hectic city or tropical market town. Who do I call if I end up hopelessly lost in one of these utterly foreign places, with street names written in another language? Surely it would be just like losing my truck in Chicago, only with an order of magnitude increase in the fear and helplessness.

And forget about what to do if I actually did get lost—what about just the constant work of having to keep myself oriented so as not to get lost in the first place? Would I even be able to feel the freedom I so desperately wanted while having to do all this work?

But once I got out there, something happened that I didn’t expect. That fear of getting lost, that constant need to remember where I’d come from just… wasn’t there. I remember trying to wrap my head around this, in Bangkok (the first city I visited) and everywhere else. Here I am, in the middle of [insert your Asian city here], and yet that feeling in the pit of my stomach is absent. I’m just… not scared of getting lost—like, at all. Why?

It was then that I realized the feeling of being lost is not the feeling of being somewhere new and strange; it’s not even the feeling of being disoriented in your immediate surroundings, or losing the street you just came from. It’s the feeling of being away from your stuff—or your people.

Every single thing that I owned in this new life of mine fit comfortably in the 21.5-inch backpack that sat on my shoulders. And this was a solo trip—just me. There was nothing I needed to orient myself towards. When your home is literally on your back, you’re always home. That sick, panicked feeling of being lost just loses its meaning. And what a beautiful thing that is.

Take a moment and think about your life. What aspects are the most meaningful and valuable to you? Your faith, your family, your integrity—whatever they are, make a promise right now to never separate yourself from those things—physically or metaphorically—and you will never lose your way. How could you, if your home is always with you?

And to my fellow backpackers out there: Pack light, gosh darn it. If your backpack is so big and heavy you’re constantly dying to shrug off and leave it somewhere—well, don’t get mad at me when you get lost.