On travel, belonging, and the curious habit of never quite settling down.
I've been in Cairo for nearly two weeks now. I originally intended to stay for a few days.
But then again, this is something I seem to do quite often.
I came back through Cairo because I'd been offered work in Siwa, an oasis in Egypt's Western Desert. The plan was relatively straightforward: travel to Siwa, return to Cairo for a few days, visit my mother, take care of a few things, and head home to Luxor.
Except Siwa has a way of leaving a hook in me.
Every time I visit, I find myself thinking about when I can return. The desert, the stillness, the immense skies, the particular rhythm of life out there. Something about the landscape gets under my skin, and before I've even left, I'm already imagining my next visit.
Endless traffic in Cairo
I returned to Cairo, where my mother has been seriously ill and was admitted to hospital. I intended to stay just a little longer to check on her. But one day became another, circumstances changed, friends invited me to stay, and suddenly here I am, nearly two weeks later, without a particularly clear exit plan.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, I keep thinking:
I really need to get home.
But then another question occurs to me.
Home? Where exactly is that?
I've spent much of my adult life travelling. Not quite nomadically, because I've almost always had a base to return to, but with a voracious appetite for movement that began nearly twenty years ago and has only intensified.
I can barely remember a time when there wasn't another flight to catch, another city to visit, another person to see, or another experience waiting somewhere.
In 2024, after a particularly busy period of travelling, I remember staying home for three consecutive days and actually asking a friend whether what I was feeling was normal.
Three days! I was beginning to feel strange.
Apparently, I had become so accustomed to movement that remaining in one place required some getting used to.
And I wonder now, have I built a life around travelling because I love it, or have I simply forgotten how to stay still?
Of course, there's a great deal that I genuinely love about this life. My friendships stretch across continents, my work takes me into extraordinary places, and I have the wonderful privilege of feeling familiar in cities that are thousands of kilometres apart.
But Egypt is something else entirely.
One of the things that fascinates me most about living here is how dramatically the geography changes from one place to another, and how differently I feel within each landscape.
Cairo is electric. Expansive, international, endlessly stimulating. There is always another conversation to have, another exhibition, café, or neighbourhood to explore. I can arrive with absolutely no plans and fill two weeks without even scratching the surface of everything there is to do.
Siwa feels almost like another world. The desert stretches beyond what the eye can comprehend, and the silence has a presence of its own. Time seems to operate differently there. It's a place that encourages a particular kind of reflection, whether you intended to reflect or not.
And then there's Luxor.
The Nile, the mountains, the villages, the ancient monuments sitting quietly alongside everyday life. The West Bank has a rhythm that feels entirely different from Cairo, and it's a place where I imagine I might finally establish some meaningful routines, write more, practise more, and simply enjoy my own company.
West Bank Corniche- Luxor
Each place brings out something different in me.
Perhaps that's part of the difficulty. I don't feel that I have to choose between them because I feel so deeply at home in all of them.
During the turbulence of these past months, a few people have suggested that perhaps I should return to Canada.
The thought genuinely hasn't occurred to me.
I have no desire to leave Egypt. I'll certainly be spending the winter here, and as far as I'm concerned, this is my home.
In fact, one of the things I find most remarkable is that I don't necessarily feel more at home in one Egyptian city than another. Moving through this country feels like walking from one room of my house into another.
Egypt itself feels like my living room.
Different landscapes, different people, different rhythms, but an underlying familiarity that makes me feel entirely comfortable wherever I go.
It's my country, through and through.
So the question isn't whether I should leave Egypt.
It's whether I can learn to stay somewhere within it.
I've recently moved to Luxor, and in theory, that's where I've decided to establish my base. Somewhere to build routines, create a home, and have my own space to return to.
But here's the funny thing.
I've spent so much time travelling since moving there that I've barely had the opportunity to find out what living there actually feels like.
This month alone, I've spent twenty-one days on the road. I'm already planning another trip to Cairo in November, December remains something of a mystery, and naturally, I'm thinking about returning to Siwa.
Sometimes I wonder whether I'm designing a life or simply continuing one out of habit.
I've also entered a different chapter of adulthood. The years of raising my daughter, maintaining a household, and organising my life around the responsibilities of motherhood have changed. My daughter is beginning her own adult life in Vancouver, and I find myself with a freedom that I once could only imagine.
But freedom, as it turns out, presents its own questions.
When you can go almost anywhere, how do you decide where to stay?
When your friends and family are scattered around the world, what does it mean to put down roots?
Vancouver, BC, Canada. My Family, summer 2026
And when movement has become such a familiar part of your identity, how do you distinguish between the desire to explore and the inability to remain?
I've been thinking about people who spend years on tour, and friends of mine who have embraced a genuinely nomadic life. One friend, another Egyptian Canadian, has been travelling continuously for about three years. I wonder how people living this way find their own sense of equanimity.
Do they eventually crave a permanent home, or does movement itself become the thing that grounds them?
And perhaps the more interesting question is whether the same lifestyle that feels liberating to one person might be exhausting to another.
I know that my own relationship with home and belonging is complicated. I've lived independently from a very young age, and the family structures that many people grow up taking for granted were never quite my experience.
Perhaps movement has always been a natural expression of my independence. Perhaps it has also, at times, been a way of avoiding the discomfort of staying still.
I'm not entirely sure.
What I do know is that I would like to become more intentional about how I spend my time.
I don't imagine settling down will suddenly turn me into someone who keeps conventional office hours. My work crosses continents and time zones, and I rather like that freedom. What I want is something consistent underneath it all: some routines that belong to me, a home I actually inhabit, and the ability to return to my own work without starting over each time life interrupts.
I want quiet, but I also want stimulation. I want the slow rhythm of the Nile, but I also want espresso, international conversations, art, and the possibility of walking into a city that never seems to end.
For heaven's sake, part of the reason I came to Cairo was to buy soy sauce and espresso.
Apparently, these are the complicated requirements of my otherwise simple existence.
I'm beginning to realise that if I want to build a meaningful daily life, I may need to give myself the opportunity to actually live one.
Not simply organise my belongings somewhere between journeys.
Not treat the spaces between trips as waiting rooms for the next adventure.
And not wait until my body eventually announces that it has had enough.
I don't know whether Luxor will become my permanent home.
In fact, I find the very idea of permanence rather unsettling.
People often ask me when I move somewhere, "Is this forever? Have you moved permanently?"
Forever?
What does that even mean?
I find myself wondering who actually makes decisions in those terms. Who looks at the immense unpredictability of life and confidently declares that they know where they'll be living for the rest of it?
Certainly not me.
And perhaps that's where I begin to recognise just how differently people experience the world. When someone asks whether I've moved somewhere permanently, I sometimes feel as though they haven't understood anything about how I function.
But then again, perhaps I don't entirely understand how they function either.
For some people, permanence represents security, stability, and something to build upon. For me, it can feel like an unnecessary promise to a future version of myself whom I haven't even met yet.
I can choose a place wholeheartedly without needing to declare that I'll never leave it.
And I can build a home, establish routines, invest in friendships, and become part of a community without imagining that any of those things require a lifelong contract.
Perhaps the real distinction is between permanence and presence.
I don't need to know that I'll stay somewhere forever to give myself permission to be fully there now.
What I do know is that I want to find a little more equanimity within the life I've created. A little more consistency beneath all the movement, and the opportunity to experience the ordinary pleasure of actually inhabiting my own home.
Perhaps the challenge isn't learning how to stop moving.
Perhaps it's learning how to arrive.
Luxor Sunset- October 4th 2026, I took myself out for a Birthday excursion.
