Some stories don’t just touch us — they mirror us.
The story about the man who lived twelve years in Bali without a mobile phone is one of those mirrors. A cognitive scientist interviewed him and said something that struck me deeply:

“People think phones steal attention. They steal continuity.”

It took time before I understood how profound that sentence really is.
Because when I read about him, I realized that I myself had gone through three major shifts in life — three places where I found my way home, three places where my nervous system was allowed to return to a state that feels almost forbidden today:

Bali. Torus. Bansko.

They came at different stages of my life.
But the calm… the rhythm… the feeling of belonging…
They were identical.

BALI 2001 – the first time I truly found home

When I traveled to Bali for the first time in 2001, I had no idea what the island would come to mean to me. I was younger, more open, more intuitive. Bali back then was something very different from the tourist paradise many people see today — it was a place where time moved slowly and softly, in the rhythm of the waves and the rhythm of life itself.

I returned in 2005.
And again in 2007.

And all three times the same thing happened:

I didn’t just arrive on an island.
I arrived in myself.

There I discovered something almost impossible to explain to someone who has never been without noise: the feeling that time is not chasing you. It was as if my brain said, “Finally.” Long days. The smell of spices and ocean. Ceremonies without hurry. Warmth that held the body instead of stressing it.

This was where I first tasted what the researcher later called deep-time perception — the ability to feel days, seasons, and decisions as one coherent flow instead of fragmented moments.

And there was one symbolic moment that defined everything:

When my mobile phone battery died.

I remember it clearly.
A younger version of myself, standing on a beach, with a dead phone and a body that suddenly felt free.
Not bound.
Not chased.
Not split.

It was the first time I felt that strange, profound happiness—the happiness that arrives when everything becomes quiet.

A happiness that would follow me for decades.

TORUS — where I rebuilt myself from the ground up

Many years later I stood on the deck of my sailboat, Torus.

And Torus is not a random name.

A torus is a shape found in physics and energy theory: a continuous circulation, a loop where energy moves inward and outward in a perfect, eternal flow. It exists in nature, in magnetic fields, in trees, in the human body.

I gave the boat that name because it represented exactly what I was searching for:
a life flow that wasn’t linear and broken — but circular and healing.

When I moved aboard, I was worn down. Mentally exhausted. Medicated. Stressed. Searching. I was not the same person who visited Bali in 2001. I had carried too much, pushed too hard, ignored myself too long.

But on Torus, something slowly began to change.

Time came back to me

The sun’s path.
The wind across the harbor.
The water knocking gently against the hull.

There were no interruptions.
No notifications.
No endless stream of other people’s lives.

It sounds simple — but it changed my brain.
Just like the man in Bali, I began to feel continuity again.
Life became chapters, not scattered fragments.

Memory started to heal

The researcher spoke about the spatiotemporal loop — the brain’s ability to bind memories to places, smells, sounds, light. When life is constantly interrupted, the loop breaks.

On Torus, it reformed.

I remember exactly where I stood when I decided to quit my medication.
I remember the mornings when seaweed smell mixed with fog.
I remember the night when my tinnitus — my 6000 MHz frequency — suddenly felt less like an enemy and more like a part of me.

My brain began storing life in whole scenes again.

And then came the silence

On Torus I discovered the same thing I first felt on Bali:

I am at my happiest when everything becomes quiet.
When the phone dies.
When the computer shuts off.
When the power goes out.

Because that is when I hear myself.

Most people panic in those moments.
I feel peace.

It wasn’t nostalgia — it was biology.
My brain celebrated every second without artificial stimulation.

The world stopped being a threat

The water teaches you to respond correctly — not quickly.
This changed everything.

I stopped living in fight-or-flight.
I stopped reacting to every small thing as if it were urgent.
My nervous system relearned nuance and proportion.

Just like the researcher said about the man without a phone:

“He didn’t respond faster. He responded right.”

That was me.
On Torus.
For six years.

Torus became my second Bali — but deeper, rawer, more honest.

BANSKO — the mature form of the same peace I once found in Bali

Years later, when I arrived in Bansko, I felt it instantly:

A soft vibration inside the body —
the same one I felt on Bali,
the same one I rebuilt on Torus.

It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t lived with this kind of inner rhythm.
But I knew immediately:
I had found my third home.

Bansko is not an island geographically —
but for me, it is mentally.

The Pirin Mountains carry the same silence as the sea.
That ancient, untouched stillness that exists only in places where nature is larger than human ambition.

And here everything aligned:

— the calm from Bali
— the healing from Torus
— the clarity of adulthood
— the silence I always sought
— the rhythm my brain needs
— the feeling of belonging

In Bansko, I no longer needed to escape noise.
I had built a life where noise simply doesn’t belong.

It wasn’t Bali anymore.
It wasn’t the harbor in Gothenburg.
It was something new —
and yet the same fundamental peace I had carried with me for 25 years.

Three places — one nervous system finding its way home

2001, 2005, 2007 – Bali taught me peace for the first time.
Torus restored my original brain.
Bansko became the place where I live in that rhythm every day.

And through all this, one truth connects everything:

I function best when the world becomes quiet —
because that is when I can hear my own life.

This is not an escape from modernity.
It is a return to being human.