My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the joy of traveling and exploring new places as a personal gift each year.
Pico Iyer expresses the profound impact that air travel has on his life, highlighting it as a cherished tradition that allows him to venture beyond the familiar comforts of California and Japan. He suggests that travel broadens one's horizons and offers enriching experiences that contribute to personal growth and understanding of the world.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of experiencing different cultures, one might use this quote.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.
Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them
The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.
This is what you do on your very first day in Paris. You get yourself, not a drizzle, but some honest-to-goodness rain, and you find yourself someone really nice and drive her through the Bois de Boulogne in a taxi. The rain's very important. That's when Paris smells its sweetest. It's the damp chestnut trees.
...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.
A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.
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