Conversations On The Road
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Conversations On The Road
24.09.2026
Some of the best conversations happen on the road, don't they.
There is something special about meeting people while travelling. Perhaps because being on the road implies that you are going somewhere. And going somewhere means leaving something behind and opening yourself up to something unfamiliar, even if only slightly.
And even if you carry your home with you in a van.
There is something about being on the road that puts us in a slightly different state of mind, in between places. Perhaps this makes us a little less attached to who we think we are. More open to questioning things, to conversations we might not normally have, and to what life is offering us in the present moment.
Not necessarily because we are going to find answers, but because something in us becomes available to ask questions again.
Who am I? What am I doing here? What actually matters to me?
And perhaps one of the oldest questions of all: what is home, and where is home?
These are seemingly simple questions, but when they come from someone who has spent much of their life feeling out of place, they can open up a much deeper search for meaning.
A Conversation On The Road
Since I arrived in Puglia, I have kept experiencing these kinds of moments: meeting aligned people in beautiful places, sharing unfiltered conversations about life, and finding myself in encounters that seem to happen outside of space and time.
The second place I stopped at was an agricampeggio in Val d'Itria near Ostuni. As I jumped out of my van, puzzled because I couldn't see any sign and had no idea whether I had arrived, I asked out loud:
“Is this the right place?”
Giordano, who happened to be there, looked at me, equally puzzled but curious, and answered cheerfully:
“It is!”
It looked like he had just arrived too, but it turned out he wasn’t a visitor like me. He was going to look after the property while the owner was away.
As we were being shown around the land at dusk, we started chatting about the mosquitoes trying to bite us, and somehow the conversation went from killing mosquitoes to spirituality, which was a shared interest.
The next day, as I was working outside the owner's property trying to catch some Wi-Fi, I overheard Giordano talking about reading Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. That caught my attention since Yogananda is my teacher, and that book has changed me in different ways.
So I started asking Giordano questions, and we got into talking, baffled by the common experiences, realisations and observations we were both making about life.
Besides, he had recently left his home and was looking for a new one somewhere else. I was also looking for a place to call home somewhere in southern Europe.
But both our searches went deeper than the physical.
We were both interested in spirituality, in exploring the inner and outer search for home, and, perhaps more importantly, we shared the experience of having felt out of place for most of our lives.
So the questions we were asking were not random philosophical questions. They were sitting somewhere at the very base of the struggles we had lived through, and were somehow still exploring.
I found out that Giordano is a poet, teacher and writer. He loves pondering, debating, travelling, meeting authentic people and getting to the truth and beauty of things while figuring his own questions out.
This led him to start a podcast called Fuori Luogo. It is a bit of a pun in Italian. Literally, it means “out of place”, but in this context, it speaks to that feeling of displacement that comes from not feeling at home and not knowing where home actually is.
And so he asked me if it was OK to record our conversation and spelled out perhaps some of my favourite questions of all time:
What is home? Where is home?
What is Home
For most of my life, I thought home meant a physical place, with people in it, that made you feel whole or gave you a sense of belonging. All I knew was that where I came from was not home.
And so I started searching.
I went to Africa when I was 20 because I was looking for “home”. I dreamt of a life closer to the truth of being human, with images in my mind of dancing barefoot around a fire and creating friendships that felt essential and deep.
At the time, I had no clue that my quest was spiritual. I didn't know that the home I was looking for was actually somewhere inside of me.
Looking back, I can see that much of my search for home has been a search to disrupt the mind patterns that keep us away from ourselves: adapting, performing, pleasing, protecting and becoming whoever we think we need to be, instead of living in alignment with who we actually are.
Home turned out to be a state of inner connectedness.
If home is connection to our essence, then the subconscious mind is often the thing standing in between. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I ended up working with the mind: because so much of my own journey has been about finding my way back home.
And this is where the question of home becomes less geographical.
Because if home is an internal state, then potentially, it is already here. You don't need to move to another country, perfect people or perfect circumstances.
You already carry it within you.
And yet, it can also be the hardest thing of all to find.
Because when we can't find our way back to ourselves, we can change jobs, relationships or countries, reinvent ourselves completely, and still carry the same feeling of being out of place.
Perhaps this is also why travelling can be so useful. Moving away from what is familiar can shake things loose, interrupt old patterns, expose us to different ways of living and different versions of ourselves, and sometimes give us glimpses of something that feels more truthful and aligned.
Where is Home
When Giordano asked me the second question, “Where is home?”, I honestly thought I could easily answer it.
Instead, I went silent… and realised: I just don't know anymore.
Because once I understood that the feeling of home is ultimately an inner state, I thought the question of where to live would somehow become irrelevant.
But strangely enough, it didn't.
If anything, it changed.
Being home within yourself is beautiful, but I still picture a physical place to be, with people in it. A place where my way of living, values, curiosity and the way I see life don't feel out of place.
And so the search continues in both directions: inward, towards deeper layers of authenticity and connection with myself, and outward, towards a place and people that somehow represent what I am finding within.
Which brings me back to this unfiltered conversation.
Two people in between places, arriving pretty much at the same time in the same spot, both carrying a search for home with them.
We had both spent a good chunk of our lives feeling out of place. We were exploring spirituality, the inner and outer search for home, and what it might mean to finally feel that we belong somewhere — within ourselves, in the world, or perhaps both.
That day, we didn't find answers, but something better. We stirred questions that had already been sitting there for a long time and deserved revisiting... once in a while.
Here's the link to Giordano's podcast, Fuori Luogo, in Italian: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Jox4rs1PwASA3Zv8I4FzZ?si=b91ec1538ff94ef6
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