“You’re almost home,” said my Uber driver, as I stepped into his car.

I smiled and said “yes”, but in my heart, I quietly disagreed. I am home. Right now. After long journeys like the one I just completed from Asia to the US, without having a geographic “base” to call home, the knowingness that “I am always home” is slippery.

Listen to this article here (read by AI).

That’s the thing about being a digital nomad. My suitcase is a running joke, it’s my portable life. But the truth is deeper than that. I carry my home with me not in luggage, but in myself. In my body, my heart, my sense of presence. Like a turtle. Wherever I go, I’m already there.

The driver meant well. He was being kind. And without knowing it, he gave me a gift — a reminder of how fortunate I am to feel at home everywhere. No countdown. No “almost.” Just here, now, home.

We tend to think of home as a place. A matter of space — somewhere you travel to, somewhere you’re not quite at yet. But what if home is less a location and more a moment? What if being home is a time inquiry, not a space one? You are home right now. Always, right now.

That reframe opened something up in me. And then, layered right on top of it, came the time puzzle.

Time Is Wonkey

I’d just crossed more than 24 hours of travel. Around the world. I left Vietnam on April 12th in the afternoon, and landed in Oregon on April 12th in the afternoon. Same date. Same general time of day. Different hemisphere, different continent, different everything - except the clock.

I left from the future. Vietnam is 14 hours ahead. I crossed datelines, time zones, and hemispheres, and somehow arrived at the same moment I departed. Different coordinates, same clock.

Vietnam is in the “tomorrow” of Portland :)

That made me ponder.

Time, as we relate to it , the way we read clocks, measure hours, structure our days, is a human construct. Yes, it’s anchored in physics. Yes, it follows the laws of this 3D reality we inhabit, synced to circadian rhythms and the rotation of the earth. But the way we symbolize and communicate time? We built that. We agreed on it. And nothing makes that clearer than flying around the globe, watching the hours pass, and landing exactly where you started on the calendar.

Time is weirder than we let ourselves acknowledge.

We take it as fixed. As objective. As fact. But if you’ve ever spent time in a deeply imaginative state: daydreaming, meditating, or disconnecting from 3D reality, you’ve probably felt how elastic it can be. Those who’ve experienced psilocybin know this intimately. Time stretches, collapses, folds. You can feel like you’re in several places at once, and it may feel like a glitch. Quantum physics has been pointing at this for decades. A particle can exist in multiple states simultaneously. “What the Bleep Do We Know?” - that film from the early 2000s, brought this into mainstream conversation before most people were ready for it. Itzhak Bentov talked about it in his work, and Federico Faggin keeps opening my head to it.

We live as if time is a straight line. But maybe it’s more of a field.

Adopt A Different Lens on Time

Travel is one of the best tools I know for noticing the invisible structures you live inside, and time is one of them. When you’re constantly crossing time zones, adjusting your sleep, resetting your rhythm, you stop relating to the clock as something fixed and start relating to it as something you negotiate with. The structure becomes visible precisely because you keep disrupting it.

And that structure does have real value. Linear time: calendars, schedules, shared reference points, is genuinely useful. It helps us coordinate, plan, show up for each other. Being a good timekeeper isn’t something to dismiss. When you’re in tune with time, life flows more easily. That’s real.

But being in tune with something is different from being imprisoned by it. Questioning a system means understanding it well enough to use it consciously, despite the initial urge to abandon it. The same way I think about money, identity, and every other structure we’ve inherited: know the rules, know who made them, and decide for yourself how much authority they have over you. Time deserves the same scrutiny. Try experiencing it differently; through stillness, through travel, through whatever loosens the grip of the default setting.

And You?

Lately, my experience of time has been genuinely strange. Over the last few years, I feel everything accelerating… so much happening in a single day that time just flies. And then I look back at the last six years and it feels like two decades. One year feels like ten. The compression and the expansion seem to be happening simultaneously, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I’m curious where you are with this. How do you experience time right now, and has that changed?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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♥️ Efrat