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When I think back on it, it's amazing what happens to us as we move out into the world.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

Everybody fears the unknown. But I have a strong feeling there's something bigger than us. I don't think all this exists because some rocks happened to collide. I'm at peace. When it comes, I'll be fine, calm. I'll miss life, though. Especially my family.

My kids miss me when I'm away, but I don't mind living out of a suitcase. The U.K., U.S., France, Germany, Iraq... it's such a thrill meeting people of different cultures, learning about and from them. It's changed my perception about life, humanity and spirituality.

Just knowing that there's somebody else out there - that what's happened on this planet has also happened in many other places - that might change our lives in a very subtle way, but it's interesting to know and worth looking for.

In refugee camps around the world, I met people who were gone. They were still walking around but had lost so much that they were unable to claim any sort of identity. Others I met found who they truly were, and they generally found it through service to others. They became teachers when there was no school, books or pencils.

The places I've been, or passed through, or seen at a distance, have had as much an impact on my life as the people I've known.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.

I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone's apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.