“Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.” — Seneca

My passport is my most prized possession. I keep it close to hand, like a sidearm or a manifesto for a revolution I’ve sworn to bring about. It bears some clues to my identity, not just my identifying features but my actual identity. Imprinted into the pages of that thin book, in faded ink hieroglyphs, are all the dates and places that pinpoint my life story. It is packed with security features: holograms, complex graphics, and indecipherable cryptograms. It has been scrutinized by many, and sometimes confiscated by corrupt border officials or agents of failed states across the world. Oddly, I identify more with those failed states than I do my own passport country, whose good standing in the international community has nonetheless eased my passage across the globe. I could care less about citizenship and nationalism. First and foremost I’m an Earthling. Second, I’m a global nomad. Freedom of movement across the planet is what I care most about, it is the most precious thing we can have as human beings.

    They didn’t stamp my passport when I repatriated. It seems they no longer stamp passports upon reentry. Entry stamps used to be an art form. Travellers in the 1970s were subjected to an array of clever acronyms. Best known is the SHIT stamp, meaning Suspected Hippie In Transit. Scruffy undesirables that trailed across the Thai or Malay borders would have ‘SHIT” stamped in their passports. Twice in six weeks, while I was travelling solo through South East Asia in the mid 1980s, my passport was stolen. The authorities suspected I was selling them and put me on a watch list. I imagine they still have a dossier with my name on it. In Kampala in 2006, after drinking one too many Extra Strong Brew’s, I lost a third passport to stupidity. And then there was that wild and windy night on the Kenyan coast —while I slept in a four poster bed on the second floor of my friend’s ocean-front villa with the bedroom’s beveled glass doors wide open, as waves crashed against the coral cliffs with a steady, fat beat, and palm fronds danced in the wind like ravers, and all that aural delirium was reverberating through my unconscious mind — when a stealthy band of thieves snuck into my bedroom and made off with my laptop, my portable speaker, and a travel wallet containing US dollars, mementoes, and my passport. 

    When I discovered the theft the next morning, I called the police. Two hours later, a pot-bellied officer and his hijab-wearing adjutant showed up to launch an investigation. They took my statement and particulars, inspected my room, and quickly deduced that the thieves had climbed up the outside wall of the house and entered from the terrace. Searching the grounds for any clues the robbers may have left behind, we then followed a set of footprints to an adjacent beach. There, laying face down on the soft white sand a few feet from the surf, like a drowned migrant, was my passport. For all I knew, the cops were in on the crime and had simply dropped it there while I wasn’t looking. Sykes monkeys might have taken it. Who cares? I had my damn passport back. 

    I once collected all the expired passports that were still in my possession and created a spreadsheet from the dates and places. By the age of 21, I’d lived in seven countries on three continents and travelled more than 100,000 miles, circling the globe three times. 

    Not everyone wants to travel. Some never leave the town they were born in. Some only travel within their own countries, or their own languages and cultures, brooking no destinations but those that resonate with their own beliefs. Some have simply avoided travelling by air because of a fear of terrorism, viruses or climate change, and will instead travel as far as they can by rail, road, and sea. Some are psychonauts who travel in their own minds. Some travel through no choice of their own. Stoics like Seneca shun travel as a distraction from one’s self, believing one is simply fleeing the life one has created. Travel’s not for everyone. But like it or not, we all travel. Even if we stay put, we travel. That’s because the Earth is always in motion: rotating, wobbling, and orbiting the Sun as it moves across the Universe. Your position on Earth creates a pattern, what I call your chronospatial trajectory. Even if you stay put, the planet’s motions ensure you’ll still have a chronospatial trajectory, one that resembles one of those coiled telephone cords from 30 years ago. Remember when one of those got so tangled up it was impossible to restore it to its original shape? That’s my chronospatial trajectory.

    My whole life I’ve been in orbit, spinning around the planet, unable to return home. I’m like a forgotten ape aboard a rusty old space capsule launched in the early years of the Rocket Age that’s been falling to Earth ever since, but every time I get close to reentering the atmosphere a solar flare, or a piece of space junk, or that bone the man-ape hurls in the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey bumps me back up into orbit again. I may never return to Earth. Growing up in Africa and Asia during the 1960s and 70s turned me into a terminal global nomad. They say variety is the spice of life, but I’ve yet to find a recipe that palatably blends my disparate cultural ingredients. I am my own melting pot, and I’ve got a backstage pass to the world.

    As a global hobo who’s dropped out of three universities, lived on four continents, and moved through five careers, I don’t fit any social profile. I once believed there’d be an end to this way of life, that one day I’d repatriate to my home and native land and be sedentarily content. But in reality, uprooting as an infant and then every three years or so, sometimes continents at a time, created a rootless, restless nature in me that cannot be quelled. I’ve been on a lifelong quest to belong, to find a place to call home, settle, and to find my identity. But to stay balanced I must continue to move forward.

    It may seem sullen to bellyache about an upbringing as rich and exotic as mine was. Truth be told, I wouldn’t change any of it for the world. But knowing what I know now, I might try to carry less grief, avoid being a rebel when it serves no purpose, and stay connected to my passport country, maintain ties with my relatives back home. Global nomadism is an education beyond any other, it helped shaped me into the world citizen I am. But nothing good comes without a price. Mine is homelessness. This book is about a reluctant repat trying, after a lifetime as an expat, to find home in his homeland. It’s a memoir about the uneasy transition I’ve faced upon reentry to my passport country, again and again, and the reasons why global nomads find it so damn hard to adapt. It’s also about the diversions I took, my emotional detachment, and the smorgasbord of self-medicating I did to try avoid the trauma of facing up to the truth about who I am: a deeply flawed human being. In it, I confront my choices and try to become a better person.