22/04/2026
We Found Home on the Other Side of the World.
Most people are searching for something.
They just don’t realise it’s not a thing at all.
I knew for years. Long before we packed our lives into suitcases and left Shrewsbury behind. I knew the world had more in it than what I was being shown.
More colour, more possibility and more ways to be alive. But the message was always the same. Stay. Build. Accumulate. Find a job title you can introduce yourself with at parties or just meeting new people and call that a life.
So we left.
Four months ago we stepped off that treadmill and onto a plane. And what we found on the other side has been quietly dismantling everything I thought I understood about how life works.
Thailand first.
Three months on that island and something started to speak to me. Was it the pace of the island. The way a £1.50 meal on a plastic chair by the road tasted better than anything I’d eaten in an expensive restaurant back home.
The way people worked: hard, often harder than anyone I knew in the UK and yet moved through their days without the grey weight of it all.
Nobody seemed to be performing their life. They were just living it. Your job title means nothing here and to be honest no one cares. The only people that ever asked were expats and often it seemed that people only asked because, that’s what you do! Surface level chat but never the question I wished someone who say: you have two hours to change the world, what’s your plan.
Then Vietnam.
New country. New energy. Still the same feeling underneath it all. We arrived with three months in mind but left after a few weeks. Not every place is yours and we are leaning to listen to the voice more and more.
While we never managed to find the home we were looking for here, it still echoed the same truth.
This world is not what you were told. You just have to be willing to feel your way through it honestly. Even when that means letting go of the plan.
And now Bali.
I am a foreigner here, like all the places we visit.
I don’t speak the language. I don’t share the same customs or the history, I do however, feel the energy and the spirituality of the island… And yet I have never felt more at home somewhere in my entire life.
People here are happy. Not the kind of happy you post about. The quiet kind. The kind that doesn’t need an audience, a thumbs up or love heart.
I see poverty. Real, visible poverty. I see towns and people just trying to survive. And what I also see, which is what stops me in my tracks: is the dignity and Grace of its people.
A man on a scooter with nothing by western standards smiling like he’s already figured out what the rest of us are still looking for.
What is wrong with that picture? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Here is what nobody tells you when you stay put.
Petrol here costs me 40p a litre. A meal for three with proper local food, cold drinks is eight pounds. A life that would cost you three, four, five thousand pounds a month in the UK costs a fraction of that here. And the life is bigger. Fuller. Richer in every way that actually matters.
We were sold a story. Work more to buy more to owe more to need more. Consume until you’re numb and then consume some more.
Watch the news so you know exactly what to be afraid of today. Don’t look too far outside the edges of what we’ve decided is normal.
The world outside those edges! Believe me It’s fine. More than fine. Children are laughing. People are eating together. The sun is rising over rice fields and nobody is checking their phone to see what fresh disaster has arrived overnight.
I’m not saying life here is perfect. Some mornings the anxiety still finds me. The worry shows up uninvited and sits on my chest before I’ve even had coffee.
Four months of freedom doesn’t undo forty years of programming overnight.
But I’m learning. Slowly. Gratefully.
That the thing most of us are searching for isn’t somewhere exotic or expensive or out of reach.
It was always available.
We just had to stop being told it wasn’t
