Travelling Light

I recently made the decision to move out of my home and into a long-stay hotel — and honestly, it wasn’t that big a deal. As a pensioner, I travel light these days, so I spent no more than half an hour stuffing everything I needed into a rucksack. Done. For most people, moving home is nothing short of an epic undertaking — the sorting, the packing, the endless decluttering. But not for me.

The idea didn’t come out of the blue. It had been quietly taking shape for years, rooted in a bigger question I’d been asking myself: how did I want to live out my retirement?

I can still pinpoint the exact moment it first stirred. It was eight years ago, on a Friday evening in July, when I said goodbye to my colleagues at a university in Macau where I’d been working for  many years. I switched off my computer for the very last time, and pressed  through the campus — past the glinting waterways and the green stretches of meadow shimmering in the summer sunset. It was a beautiful place, and I took my time leaving it.

Then I boarded the jetfoil back to Hong Kong — for the last time  (I would still make trips back to Macau in the following years, but that’s  a different story).  As the ferry sailed out into a glowing but fast fading sunset, I sat with those fresh images of the campus still vivid in my mind, and something quietly shifted inside me. A chapter was closing, and a new one was waiting to be written.

When I arrived home in Hong Kong, I  looked around the flat. Everything was familiar — perhaps too familiar. The sofa bed that my late mother had slept on  until she moved out to a care home in her last years; the windows that framed the flux of the world for the past five decades.  It all felt perfectly fine, and yet something nagged at me. I’d always assumed that retirement would simply mean returning home to resettle, to ease naturally into a quieter domestic life. But standing there, I wasn’t so sure anymore. I found myself wondering: ‘is this really how I want the next chapter to look?’

At first, I thought it might be about freedom. The romance of it — cutting loose, breaking free from routine. But that idea quickly fell apart under scrutiny. Freedom isn’t something you find by changing your location. If your heart is already free, it doesn’t much matter where you lay your head. I was just as free in my Hong Kong flat as I would ever be in any hotel room. So freedom wasn’t it.

What it was really about, I slowly came to realise, was the desire to travel light — not just in terms of luggage, but in life itself. And that began with taking a long, honest look at the things around me.

The flat was cluttered with years of accumulated living. Among the most meaningful objects were my mother’s personal effects — her clothes, her belongings, all the things she’d kept close when she was there. Letting go of them in the conventional sense felt unthinkable. But technology offered a quiet solution: I photographed everything and preserved it all in the digital world. It struck a balance between honouring the emotional weight of those memories and freeing myself from their physical presence. That was an important realisation — that keeping something in your heart doesn’t require keeping it in your home.

When the flat underwent a major renovation some years later,  a great deal of old furniture was cleared out as a result and I took up lodging in a hotel in the meantime.  When I moved back in, the place had been restored  to its bare interiors, exuding the same sense of spaciousness as it did more than 50 years ago.  With sunlight streaming  in, sparkling off the freshly  painted white walls and the shiny mosaic floor, it transported me back to being that child of ten in 1968 when I, upon opening its door, would enter  a whole new world of light and roominess.    The space now breathed in a way it hadn’t for decades. There was a kind of quiet clarity to it that I hadn’t expected to find so moving.

That experience of minimalism turned out to be more than just an aesthetic preference — it became a philosophy. A way of thinking about how to live. And it raised one final, liberating question: if I could feel this light, this unanchored, in my own renovated flat — why not take it one step further? Why not beat a path that would untie myself entirely from the idea of a fixed home, and simply see what that felt like?

And so a serviced apartment became the logical next step. Not a chase for something missing, not an escape from anything. Just a quiet, deliberate choice to live differently — to carry only what I needed, and leave the rest behind.