If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
Neil PeartRead
If I have to travel, I'm going to travel my way and travel in the real world. And I'm going to have conversations every day with people in rest stops and people in gas stations and people in hotels and diners. That nourishes me.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the value of personal experiences and interactions during travel.
Neil Peart expresses the idea that true travel is not about visiting landmarks or tourist spots, but rather about genuine interactions with people in everyday settings. For him, engaging in conversations with locals at rest stops, gas stations, hotels, and diners provides not only nourishment for the soul but also enriches the travel experience, highlighting the importance of human connection and immersion in different cultures.
In practice
During a travel seminar, you could quote Peart to illustrate the importance of engaging with locals.
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
The real test of a musician is live performance. It's one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.
Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.
It seems to me that's the only way you can have a truly creative aggregate of people is if they're all contributing in different ways.
What I've learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal - or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.
I've heard the stories. Like, Eric Clapton said he wanted to burn his guitar when he heard Jimi Hendrix play. I never understood that because, when I went and saw a great drummer or heard one, all I wanted to do was practice.
That is the magic of travel. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. But as you travel, the world in all it's richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space. You return a different person.
When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.
For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.
We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.
Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.
Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
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