Last week, I lost something.
Not my phone. Not my passport. Not my sense of direction.
Just my address.
For the first time in my life, I no longer have a place I can instinctively write into forms or give to someone making a delivery. Everything I own is either in storage or packed into the two suitcases and backpack I’m carrying, and the house I called home for nearly a decade will soon belong to someone else.
For fifty-three years, if someone had asked me where I lived, the answer came almost automatically.
Bengaluru.
Lawrence.
Minneapolis.
Woodbury.
Every chapter of my life had an address.
For twenty-five of those years, that address was a home I owned. Three different houses. Three different seasons of life. Looking back now, I realize they were never simply structures. They were where babies were born, birthdays were celebrated, growth was measured with pencil marks on a wall, and ordinary Sundays spent watching football games, tending to unfinished projects, or lazing around knowing there was nowhere else I needed to be.
Perhaps that’s why selling my house sounded so irrational to some people.
A month ago, if you’d asked me what this first week would feel like, I probably would have said uncertainty. Maybe even loneliness.
After all, we spend much of our lives believing that security is something we build outward. We work hard, save carefully, buy a home, fill it with memories, and slowly begin to mistake permanence for ownership. We tell ourselves we’ve built a life, when sometimes we’ve simply built a place to keep it.
I thought I would miss having an address.
What I didn’t expect was to begin questioning whether that had ever been the thing making me feel secure in the first place.
I landed in Amsterdam on Saturday and spent the afternoon with two friends who had generously cleared their calendars simply because I happened to be passing through.
It didn’t feel like visiting friends during a stopover but more like picking up a conversation that had simply been paused. When we finally hugged goodbye, I realized something that hadn’t happened to me in years. I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be.
No driveway to pull into.
No list of things waiting around the house.
No feeling that every hour spent lingering somewhere was borrowing time from somewhere else.
So I wandered till I found another café overlooking a small square, ordered another coffee, watched cyclists weave effortlessly through the afternoon, and called my mom.
She’s eighty-two now, and I don’t think anyone has worried more about me selling my house than she has.
It didn’t seem to matter that I’m fifty-three years old, have lived on my own for thirty-five years, or have spent much of my professional life somewhere between airports and hotel rooms.
In her mind, something fundamental had changed. She wanted to know where I was sleeping, whether I’d eaten, whether I was taking care of myself. I laughed because, after all these years, mothers never really stop asking those questions. But after we hung up, I realized we had been thinking about two entirely different things.
She was worried that I no longer had a place to come home to.
I was beginning to realize how many people had already made room for me.
For most of my life, I assumed home was a place you returned to. I hadn’t yet considered that it might also be something you carry with you—or something other people create for you.
Over the next several days, coffees became lunches. Drinks became dinners. Conversations became invitations.
A friend in London insisted we find time despite impossibly busy schedules.
In Cambridge, someone I hadn’t worked with in more than a decade somehow found three hours in the middle of the week simply because I happened to be nearby.
Messages started arriving from people I hadn’t seen in years asking when I’d be passing through their city. Others offered spare rooms before I’d even figured out where I was traveling next.
By the end of the week, I’d received more invitations into people’s lives than requests for meetings.
At first, I assumed people were simply responding to the novelty of what I’d done. Selling a home, packing two suitcases, and deciding not to replace it with another one immediately isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence.
Maybe they were.
But somewhere between the conversations already finding their place on my calendar for the weeks ahead, another thought kept returning.
Maybe these invitations had very little to do with last week. Maybe they had everything to do with the last thirty years.
The invitations hadn’t suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They had been accumulating through shared meals, airport reunions, conference hallways, difficult conversations, moments of celebration, moments of disappointment, and all the ordinary interactions we rarely realize are becoming relationships.
These relationships didn’t materialize because I sold my home. Selling my home simply revealed them. Perhaps home had been expanding long before I ever put the house on the market.
A few friends reached out over the past week asking some version of the same question.
“Why?”
Why give up something that represents stability? Why leave behind a home you’ve spent years building?
I understand the question because I’ve asked it myself.
This is not me rejecting home ownership. I remain deeply grateful for every home I’ve lived in and everything those homes made possible. They gave my family stability. They gave my daughters a place to grow up. They gave me memories I’ll carry for the rest of my life.
But gratitude doesn’t require permanence. Sometimes gratitude simply means recognizing that something served its purpose beautifully. And that another season is beginning.
For years, the house dictated more of my life than I realized. Every trip eventually revolved around getting back. Every extended stay carried a mental checklist.
The lawn. The snow. The maintenance. The repairs. The thousand tiny responsibilities that accompany the privilege of having a place to care for. Without noticing it, I had begun organizing my life around returning.
Now I find myself asking an entirely different question.
Not…“How quickly do I need to get home?”
But…“Who can I spend meaningful time with while I’m here?”
That is a surprisingly different way to move through the world. It changes how long you stay for coffee. Whether you accept dinner. Whether you linger after the meeting ends instead of rushing toward the airport. Whether relationships become the destination instead of something squeezed between destinations.
And perhaps, in ways I can’t fully appreciate yet, it means becoming more available to the people who mean the most to me.
Some people will always find their deepest sense of stability in having one place to return to. I understand that.
For fifty-three years, I did too.
I’m simply beginning to wonder whether this next chapter is asking me to find stability somewhere else.
Not in an address. But in the freedom to be fully present where I’m needed, with the people who matter most.
A week ago, I thought I was leaving something behind. Now I realize I was simply being shown something that had been there all along.
I may have lost my address.
But I haven’t lost my place.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
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