It’s the time of year when the ewes are being separated from the lambs, when their cries and the guttural noise from their mothers can be heard across the valley, a natural amphitheatre for the soundtrack of their separation. Country sounds have become familiar to me; I swapped the city for the country four years ago. But this particular one, the separation of the lambs from their mothers, resonates more than any other. It is the sound of displacement. A sound that, one day, will belong to us all. I lost my 62-year-old mother to cancer in 2014; I’ve been drifting ever since.

The idea of being “found” holds so much importance. It seems our entire lives are dedicated to finding spaces we can nestle into until, ultimately, we find ourselves. A milieu that is familiar, a cave that reverberates our very own sound. Perhaps this is the natural way in life, to gravitate to the things we recognise: who wants to stand alone when there is safety in numbers? But I have discovered something. Standing alone and being lost is a place where many things can be found. Not enough is said about stumbling around in the dark.

Moving from London to rural Wales was a strange decision for someone who feels they belong in the city, London, a place where a person can feel as if they’re at the centre of the world. Walk down the street and you’ll hear a plethora of voices with varied accents. I’d often engage with those voices, in the conversations that weren’t meant for me: one can live vicariously in the city. But my life had changed rather dramatically, so I left what was once familiar.

Rural Wales couldn’t be further away from my hometown. My new abode: small, quiet, provincial and white. The lack of international cuisine made me think this was an unfriendly coded message that extended to me: not interested in the foreign. And yet, I had never seen myself as foreign. I’m British.

I wondered what a brown city girl like me was doing wandering around the Welsh valleys, the only Indian in the village. If someone saw me, would they think I was lost? In a way, I was. Bereavement, and all that goes with it – my family imploded when my mum died – made me feel I was no longer part of a family, as if I had lost my identity. So I navigated my way in a new directionless Welsh land, in its dark woods and forests.

I couldn’t help but acknowledge the difference in culture, landscape and skin colour: there was no one like me. I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss the diversity of London. In the city, I was one of many. Here I stood alone, a solitary figure, a ghost wandering the land. But this difference that so starkly set me apart allowed me to discover the “other” within me. Very few times in life do we find the other within ourselves. It allows us to hover around, drone-like, examining the contours of our very being. And in all this self-examining, I learned something: one can get stuck in one’s own identity. Brown. Female. Cosmopolitan. Likes cities.

I thought I needed a plethora of things, specific requirements that needed to be met in order for me to be me. And all these aspects that I identified with, viewing them as the essential furnishings of my being, worked like human scaffolding, keeping me together and giving me shape. We put a lot of emphasis on our identity and knowing ourselves, our likes and dislikes. For instance, I thought I always needed cafés to write in, art galleries and noisy bars full of interesting people. But I have realised that these assumptions can work against us. We become rigid, less free-flowing, stuck in the details of ourselves. There’s something freeing about placing ourselves in the unfamiliar, where we think we don’t belong, about casting aside the people we think we are. There’s freedom within it – it allows us to roam.

I wasn’t perturbed by the lack of diversity in the countryside. My lostness willed me to befriend it. My lack of identity, along with the human scaffolding I’d created around me, opened me up to life in a new way. I became an apprentice to the life skills of every person that I met. This led me to a discovery: there is diversity in the countryside, a diversity that, strangely, was lacking in my London life.

In the city, people who are alike stick together. In the countryside people are stuck together, whether they’re alike or not. Cities can be cliquey; having an abundance of people to choose from stops us from discovering those we think orbit different worlds. Instead we are drawn only to those with similar backgrounds and experiences. Here, I am friends with the people I simply share a valley with. I always thought I had an eclectic group of friends until I moved to Wales. I now socialise with people who share very few commonalities with me, if any. I am friends with a sound healer who mostly wears the colour purple; Tess, a gardener, who once rowed from Wales to Ireland; and a woman in her 70s whose life is filled with a joie de vivre that I’ve never felt so profoundly.

All these people have a wealth of life experience, but none that matches my own. The interest we have in each other comes from acknowledging our differences of age, race, sex and cultural environment. It’s not something that divides us. What binds us together, like an invisible thread, is the valley that we all live in. Friendships don’t have to stem from having a great affinity with each other, but can develop from a mutual curiosity, admiration and respect for one another. This quirky friendship group that I now lean on has highlighted something to me: how much we miss in life by sticking to what we already know. It’s a great misconception to think that because someone is so different from you, they’ll have nothing to teach you. Precisely because they are so different from you, they have everything to teach you: life can begin anew.

When I moved away from the cacophony of the city and slipped into the quietude of the countryside, I assumed that the piechart of my life would have fewer segments. I expected my world to become smaller. But I find the opposite has happened and my world has got bigger. My life is no longer dictated by train timetables. I mark time differently now. I notice that it’s time for the lambs to be born and for the cuckoo to arrive from Africa.

Work status is less important here. “What do you do?” is a city question. Instead, I know what people like to do and what they’re good at. I know Donna can upholster an old chair and can cook a better curry than me. We all exchange skills and knowhow. Most people aren’t lucky enough to be in jobs that reflect who they are, so it’s a pointless question to ask if you want to get to know someone. Perhaps it would be better to ask someone about their passions.

I often get asked if I’d return to the city and whether the countryside is now home. If I’ve learned anything from life and from witnessing how a new season can be so transformative to a landscape, it’s that life is mercurial. It changes, and we change with it. What was once well-known can become foreign. We are never the people we once were. To say this is now my forever home would be to potentially stop future chapters in my life, to end an evolution. So, I say, it’s home for now. What I do know is that so much is said about being found, when there’s so much more to be said about being lost. How else would we tread uncharted terrain?

Have I found myself in Wales among the farm animals and people who don’t look like me? These days I care very little about being “found”. I have learned to embrace my lostness. The inevitable byproduct of any adventure is for us to change. These are transformative times. I haven’t found myself – but neither am I the black sheep. What I have found is that just because something’s different from you, it doesn’t mean it will always be estranged from you. I have come to love the rawness of life out in the country. It speaks to those who are willing to listen to it. And this, I have found, transcends race.

I feel like I am in a place of privilege living here as a person of colour. I am now someone looking out instead of in. There’s a hidden diversity in the countryside that you will only discover from living within it.

I Can Hear the Cuckoo: Life in the Wilds of Wales by Kiran Sidhu is published by Gaia at £16.99, or for £14.95 at guardianbookshop.com.
Follow her on Twitter @KiranSidhu41