Impermanence

A journey through Sardinia. Six hikers, six backpacks, six tents. An opportunity to dissect the paradox of “home” for those who redefine it every single day.

The tent and the paradox of a moving home

We pull out the backpack, load it up, and walk for days, weeks, or months, convinced, and giving the impression, that what we want is to shake off some ancient restlessness: the burden of routine and the predictability of daily life. Yet for many hikers, the journey is anything but carefree anarchy. Instead, it takes shape around a new kind of order. And the tent, with its small daily rituals, becomes its most obvious symbol.

Every evening it goes up, every morning it comes down, in a familiar sequence of gestures: laying it out, staking it down, fixing the poles, folding the sleeping pad the same way each time, always following the same creases, placing the water bottle in the same corner, slipping the headlamp into the same pocket, boiling water, pouring coffee in the morning and couscous at night, brushing teeth, finding a bush, burying the toilet paper, crawling into the sleeping bag. Then waking, walking, and repeating it all over again, day after day.

There’s something unconsciously reassuring about recreating routine within the fragile walls of impermanence. It mirrors what we do at home: we arrange our surroundings not merely for convenience, but to find a sense of ourselves in rhythms that steady a life in constant motion. The tent, then, does more than provide shelter for the night. It keeps reminding us who we are.

And yet this moving refuge resists the conventional idea of home. It doesn’t collect objects, doesn’t anchor itself to a neighborhood, doesn’t mark an arrival. That’s why, for many hikers, the very notion of “home” eventually starts to feel elusive, even impossible to pin down.

Because home isn’t a fixed point, a static and unchanging beacon. It’s a way of moving through space and time, a way of giving rhythm to motion.

The comfort of routine and the weight of predictability

For years, Federico worked as a physical education teacher and swimming instructor, calm, well-integrated, yet caught in a routine that over time began to reveal two faces: one comforting, the other suffocating. One evening, coming home from the pool, he decided it was time to step out of the machinery. He bought a one-way ticket to Nepal.

He arrived at the foothills of the Annapurna, joined a Vipassana retreat in Kathmandu, took a Hatha Yoga course in India, set off on a tuk-tuk adventure through Sri Lanka, and traveled across the Philippines and Thailand. The worlds he encountered were vibrant, alive, and utterly unlike the life he had left behind.

Then, with the same impulsiveness that had pushed him to leave, he decided to return. He missed the smallest things: long breakfasts, evenings out with friends, the routines that had driven him away yet were reasserting themselves as a basic need.
It’s striking how he was tugged by two faces of the same habit: one driving him toward the unknown, the other drawing him back home.

He returned, but not to the life he once knew. Instead, he began working seasonally in mountain refuges, places where he felt in tune with the landscape and the rhythm of the days. Among the people he worked with, he found a quiet understanding that transcended personal histories. By choosing that refuge, that home, they had all, in a way, left another behind. And there’s no stronger tie than the impulse that triggers a departure. Or an escape.

Routine

Routine gives stability in an unpredictable world. It structures time, gives rhythm to life, and creates small rituals through which we shape our story. It nurtures mental health and offers a sense of control and order.

Yet for many curious, creative, or restless people, routine can feel like a cage: a track that dictates our path until we lose awareness of it. The conflict isn’t about routine itself, but about how it aligns, or collides, with our inner world. The truth is, the value of any routine can’t be divorced from its context.

Cleaning a mountain refuge can be satisfying when you’re surrounded by peaks and people you care about, when the work supports a life you’ve chosen. The same task in a city apartment can be unbearable. Routines are neither inherently good nor bad. They are containers. What fills them—our values, our context, the people around us—is what gives them meaning.

Paradoxically, those who abandon a routine often recreate it elsewhere, as if the desire to escape masks the need to rewrite the script, rather than leave the stage entirely.

Missed opportunities and the symbolism of desire

Paolo is a man in his sixties, with the body of a forty-year-old and the mind of someone in their thirties. He has hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in the United States, the Rota Vicentina in Portugal, and multiple versions of the Camino de Santiago.

For him, home is a kind of scattered hotel: the large house he built after marriage, the small house he now lives in alone, his current partner’s home, a Portuguese cliff, his tent.

But home is also a missed opportunity in one of Italy’s most isolated villages. Perched above a green terrace surrounded by the Friulian mountains, Stavoli di Moggio is a small village reachable only by a long uphill trail. A few years ago, Paolo set his eyes on a building there, but just before closing the deal, he pulled back. Something didn’t feel right. He imagined new opportunities would come, yet since then, he has found nothing. Not a day goes by without him regretting that lost house.

The Lesson of Regret

I wonder what Paolo truly lost when he gave up a house in a village reachable only on foot: a stone building or an emotional space?

Regret often clings to decisions we see as turning points, especially when they touch deep, personal desires. But what we regret is rarely the thing itself. It is the life we imagined that thing would give us. A mountain house can represent a more essential self, freed from the city’s neuroses. The long climb to reach it can hide a need to rediscover determination and strength in a fragile moment. In longing for that house, perhaps we are not mourning the missed opportunity, but the version of ourselves we hoped to become there.

This is called counterfactual thinking: our brain’s tendency to imagine alternative outcomes and dwell on what “might have been.” Painful and, in itself, useless, it can still serve a purpose: revealing the part of ourselves we feel we’ve lost and hope to find again.

The half-closed door

Ten years ago, Edoardo moved to Switzerland. First for a PhD, then for work. Yet even now, he admits, his eyes drift back to Italy. As if there were a door at the crest of the Alps that never quite shuts. Two years ago, walking the Camino de Santiago, he found himself wondering what home really means.

Home is a place I can close behind me. Where no draft seeps in from elsewhere. Where I feel safe. As long as I keep it ajar, as long as I live abroad but look back, follow the news, visit for friends, movies, small rituals, then the door stays open. And if it stays open, how can I ever feel at home? I ask myself how long this can last, living in a place I’ll never call home. You can learn the language, you can fit in. But until you shut that door and say, ‘Now I am here, on this side,’ you’ll never truly belong.

The dead end he’s reached is easy to sketch: work in Zurich, ties in Italy. But between those poles lie shades that are harder to name, and even harder to resolve.

Each time he returns, he slips back into old friendships. But in his absence, his friends have built memories he no longer belongs to. Meetings must be planned, scheduled, fitted into an ever-shrinking window. And it is always him who must return. Because, though the motion between two points is relative, he is the one guilty of leaving.

In Zurich, he has made connections too. But they are mostly one-to-one bonds, not the woven fabric of a small community. The events he attends, sometimes even organizes, are filled with people like him: outsiders trying to belong in a city that, even without meaning to, never fully lets them in.

Then there’s the burden of being an expat. A privileged person who chose his path. No war or natural disaster pushed him from Italy. No family dragged him. No love lured him. He made a decision. And yet each day, he questions it.

The Fracture

Leaving one’s country is rarely only a matter of logistics. It is often an emotional break. The “open door” Edoardo describes is a tether: to identity, to language, to love. It’s the crack through which we watch our world move on without us. It’s the fear of losing others, and of losing ourselves. Of letting go. Of being forgotten. It’s the inability to rebuild our world in a place where maybe it cannot be rebuilt.

It is also the inertia of a motion he has allowed to unfold over the years, under the illusion that time would steer it, that it would resolve the split of his choice. And yet, after ten years, he finds his gaze still bouncing after a ball that refuses to stop.

Have you ever had to choose between two things? Two dresses for a party, two photos, two pairs of boots, two trips, two colors? Spent hours weighing the pros and cons, only to realize neither was right? I wonder if sometimes the answer lies elsewhere. Not in closing or opening the same door. But in finding another door. One that opens onto a place where impossible choices no longer keep us stuck.

📌 The note

For each story, each encounter, I’ll write down a sentence: a memory, a reminder, an insight, or a small lesson. Something I can carry with me on my journey home.

Commit fully, build rhythm, and let regret guide you.