I arrived in Morocco yesterday.
That sentence, by itself, is not especially unusual for me. I travel constantly. Over the past few years, airports, hotel rooms, unfamiliar streets, and waking up in places far from home have become part of the rhythm of my life. What is unusual is that this time, I do not have a return ticket.
I know where I am going next. India is already on the calendar. I know I will need to be back in the United States sometime in the next two months. But there is no date yet. No flight home sitting in my inbox. No fixed point on the horizon telling me when this trip ends. After India, I will figure it out.
And strangely, I am mostly comfortable with that.
Mostly.
There is something liberating about not having to organize my life around returning to a house, an office, a set of chores, or the thousand small obligations that come with maintaining a place. For years, no matter how much I traveled, there was always a home waiting for me between trips. I would come back, sit at the same desk looking out over my driveway, deal with whatever needed fixing, sort the mail, buy groceries, repack a suitcase, and eventually leave again. The house was not simply where I lived. It was the place around which everything else was arranged.
I complained about some of that mundanity. I suspect most homeowners do. The lawn needs mowing. A faucet is leaking. The furnace makes a strange noise. There is always a bill, a project, a box that needs to be moved somewhere, or something sitting in the garage that you have been meaning to get rid of for three years. None of it is dramatic, but taken together those small obligations create a kind of gravity. No matter how far you travel, eventually you return to the place where your life is stored.
I no longer have that.
When I sold my house a couple of months ago, I knew I was giving up more than a building. I wrote then about losing my address and about the strange feeling of no longer having a place I could instinctively write onto a form. What I did not fully appreciate was how quickly the absence of a home would change the way I thought about movement itself. A trip used to have two directions: away and back. Now I seem to be moving from one place to another without the same pull toward a particular point on the map.
There is freedom in that. More than I expected.
There is also a little anxiety.
The anxiety is not really about not knowing where I will be in six weeks. I have become fairly comfortable with uncertainty, perhaps more comfortable than I used to be. Plans change. Flights change. Business changes. People change. Life has taught me enough by now to know that much of the certainty we construct for ourselves is provisional anyway.
What I am less certain about is what happens when you get too good at leaving.
For the moment, I am enjoying the absence of some responsibilities. I do not have to think about a house sitting empty while I am somewhere else. I am not paying to maintain a life in one place while simultaneously paying to live another life somewhere else. I do not have the nagging feeling that I should get back because mail is piling up, something needs attention, or because I have been away too long from a building that is costing me money every day whether I am there or not.
That freedom is real. So are its costs.
One thing I am already learning is that a nomadic life can become financially irresponsible very quickly if you treat every destination like a vacation. A hotel here, a nice dinner there, another Uber, another last-minute flight, another experience justified because I happen to be in a place I may not return to soon. The cost of maintaining a house disappears, but it is surprisingly easy to replace it with the cost of constantly moving through the world. If I am going to live this way for any meaningful period of time, I have to resist the temptation to behave like a tourist simply because I do not have a kitchen waiting for me somewhere.
I also have to acknowledge the obvious privilege in even being able to have this conversation. Uncertainty is very different when you choose it. I have the resources to get on an airplane, work that can travel with me, people in different parts of the world I can call, and enough flexibility to change plans without destabilizing my entire life. For millions of people, not knowing where they will live two months from now is not freedom. It is insecurity. Romanticizing uncertainty without acknowledging that difference would be dishonest.
Still, privilege does not eliminate the questions that come with the choice.
At fifty-three, this life feels possible. More than possible. In many ways, it feels right for this season of my life. I have spent years building businesses, raising children, maintaining homes, paying mortgages, keeping schedules, and living within structures that required me to know where I was supposed to be. There is something almost intoxicating about looking at the next few months and seeing open space instead of obligations.
But I find myself thinking less about what this life looks like next year and more about what it looks like ten years from now.
If I woke up three years from now still living this way, I suspect I would still find parts of it exhilarating. The question that would begin to matter more is what happens after that, when life inevitably slows down. Will I want a home again? Will my children be more present in my life? Will there be a city or a community where I want people to notice when I have been gone too long?
Those questions do not make me want to rush back into permanence. But they do make me suspicious of any philosophy that turns detachment into an unquestioned virtue.
I have been thinking a lot about detachment lately. About wanting less. About the difference between happiness and peace. About the possibility that much of our suffering comes from clinging too tightly to people, possessions, identities, and outcomes that we cannot ultimately control. There is wisdom in learning to let go. I believe that.
But there may also be wisdom in choosing what not to let go of.
A home can become a burden, but it can also be where people gather. A relationship can restrict your freedom, but it can also be the place where another person knows you deeply enough to challenge the stories you tell yourself. Children complicate almost every plan, but that complication is part of what makes them matter. A community places expectations on you precisely because belonging creates obligations.
Commitment, by definition, limits possibility.
That is not necessarily a flaw.
We live in a culture that increasingly treats optionality as freedom. Keep your choices open. Do not get tied down. Work from anywhere. Live anywhere. Build a life that allows you to leave whenever you want. I understand the appeal because I am living a version of it right now.
But there is another way to look at it.
Perhaps choosing where we will allow ourselves to be constrained is one of the ways we decide what matters.
There is nothing particularly courageous about having no roots if the absence of roots means nobody can depend on you to stay. There is nothing particularly enlightened about detachment if what we are really doing is protecting ourselves from the vulnerability of attachment. Sometimes leaving is the brave thing to do. Sometimes staying is considerably harder.
That is the tension I am beginning to notice in myself.
I do not think I am running away from anything. I am not trying to escape my friends or family, and in truth, my time with them was already fairly sporadic when I owned a house. What I have broken is mostly the routine around them: coming back between trips, sitting in my office, doing ordinary domestic things, knowing where I will sleep a month from now without opening an app.
Those things seemed insignificant when I had them.
Now I wonder whether ordinary routines are part of how a life becomes rooted without us noticing.
We tend to think of roots as relationships, geography, history, family. Maybe they are also repetition. The coffee shop where someone knows your order. The drawer where you always put your keys. The neighbor you wave to without really knowing. The office chair that has molded itself to you over years. None of those things is important enough to organize a life around, but together they create continuity. They remind you that you existed somewhere yesterday and are expected there again tomorrow.
I do not miss all of that. Not yet.
Maybe I never will.
For now, I like waking up and not knowing exactly where I will be two months from today. I like that Morocco can lead to India and India can lead somewhere I have not decided yet. I like not having to return somewhere simply because that is where my belongings happen to be.
But I am beginning to understand that freedom and rootedness are not opposites. The real challenge may be learning when each one serves us.
For much of my life, I assumed stability meant having a place, a schedule, a predictable rhythm, and a collection of responsibilities that kept me anchored. I am discovering that I can feel remarkably stable without many of those things. What I do not yet know is whether stability without rootedness eventually becomes something else.
Maybe this season is teaching me how little I actually need.
Maybe the next season will teach me what I am willing to need again.
I have spent these past few months learning that I can let go of a house, an address, a return date, and much of the predictability I once assumed was necessary to feel secure. That has taught me something valuable about freedom.
But perhaps the next lesson is not about what else I can leave behind.
Perhaps it is about what I eventually choose to stay for.
And one question has been following me around the past 8 weeks.
Am I moving toward something, or am I simply becoming very good at leaving things behind?
Or, more uncomfortably, have I become attached to the idea of being someone who is detached?
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
