Where Are You From?
Since my last post, several people asked. Fair question. Wrong unit of measure.
I was born in Romania, a cosmopolitan pot misplaced between Slavic resonances, a Latin Heart beating in the East, were you make things work with whatever exists.
El Salvador, the Smallest Country with the Largest Heart, proved to me that trust opens in the customer's language, and that profound happiness can be a warm pupusa shared at a plastic table. Its people live every moment as if it were the whole point, because it is.
Mexico corrected me, gently: happiness is a daily practice, not a Western KPI. There, even Sorrow learns to Sing.
India did not host me, it took me In: People Humble and Generous, eager to learn and even more eager to give. There my senses discovered meditation without asking my permission, in monsoon rain, in colors, in spices I never knew existed.
Luxembourg, a country the size of a district that quietly finances a continent, convinced me that Small can think in Large portfolios.
Germany taught me structure, the quiet beauty of a documented process, and how to Begin again at 50.
So where am I from?
For years that question embarrassed me, because every honest answer sounded like an apology: not fully from here, no longer fully from there.
Then the finance brain finally did its job.
Belonging is not an address. It is a portfolio. Mine is diversified across three continents and five languages, rebalanced by life more times than I chose, and it holds one position I will never sell: the People who Lent me Confidence in every one of those places.
Where am I from? From every room that heard me in minute five.
Every one of those places took something from me, and every one left something behind: a scar here, a softness there, each one earned at full price.
For years I booked them as losses.
They were deposits.
Because together, all of them compounded into the most impressive gift a journey can pay out: Heartfulness.
And with it came the discovery that took me thirty years and every one of those places: Acasă, the Romanian word for home, the only word I never had to translate, Was Never an Address.
Acasă was always Me.
Photo: 100% real, on an Alpine trail. So is the heart.