There is a woman I once met in Lisbon, who had been a corporate attorney for seventeen years. The morning after her 45th birthday, she sat before the mirror and couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen the whites of her eyes not rimmed with red. That week, she moved into a rented room in Alfama, painted with light, and started to walk. Each morning, she walked until she found something beautiful—a doorframe, a dog, a stranger’s song.
“It saved me,” she said. “I remembered I am a living thing.”
In Kyoto, a chef returned home after a failed restaurant abroad. He’d once chased Michelin stars. Now, he cooks in silence for six guests a night, in the same house his mother once made miso by hand.
“I don’t call it a restaurant anymore,” he told me.
“I call it a table. And I invite people to sit at it.”
And then there are those who escape without ever leaving a place.
The widower who grows roses in his wife’s garden, just to feel her near.
The dancer who teaches children not choreography, but how to listen.
The artist who stopped selling prints to open a neighborhood studio, where anyone can walk in and create—no questions, no price tag.
These are not glamorous departures.
These are lives rewritten with a slower pen.
We are taught that transformation must be grand. A rebirth. A pivot. A triumph.
But sometimes, transformation is gentle.
Sometimes it is the act of stopping, breathing, noticing.
Of choosing to belong to yourself in a world that constantly asks you to belong to everyone else.
It’s the scent of salt on the wind and the first time you follow it without checking your calendar.
It’s buying a one-way ticket not to flee, but to find.
It’s saying:
“I remember who I was before I was told who I should be.”
To escape, in its truest form, is to return.
Not to a place.
But to a self that never stopped waiting for you.
So let us honor the wanderers who returned.
Not with applause, but with understanding.
Their journeys were not escape routes.
They were love letters—written in footfall, in silence, in soil.
Love letters to the earth, to the forgotten self, and to the kind of belonging that doesn’t ask you to change.
It simply welcomes you home.
STORIES OF JOURNEY, BELONGING, AND ESCAPE FROM THOSE WHO’VE WANDERED AND RETURNED TRANSFORMED
EGW LUXURY MAGAZINE | WINTER 2025
FEATURE | TRAVEL & ESCAPE
By MONICA LOFSTROM
There are people who vanish.
Quietly.
Without announcement or farewell.
Not because they are lost—but because they are seeking the thread that ties them back to themselves.
In the early winter of 1931, a woman named Freya Stark set out alone into the valleys of Western Asia—regions no Westerner, let alone woman, had ever mapped. She didn’t go with fanfare. Her pockets were not full. Her health was frail. But something in her stirred for the wild unknown. For beauty untouched by expectation. For the kind of stillness that doesn’t perform, but simply is.
She left behind a life of gentility and constraint in Italy and returned a year later with journals filled not with conquest, but communion. She had learned the Arabic names for stars. Slept beside shepherds. Sat with strangers who became guides.
She wrote:
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.”
And in many ways, hers is the echo behind every story like it.
Because some escapes are not dramatic—they are tender. They are the quiet choices people make when they realize that the life they are living, however beautiful from the outside, no longer fits the shape of their soul.
“One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a copy of one’s own.” — Freya Stark