Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love because suddenly, all your senses are at the setting marked 'on.' Suddenly, you're alert to the secret patterns of the world.
Interpretation
Travel awakens your senses and brings awareness to the beauty around you, much like being in love.
In this quote, Pico Iyer draws a parallel between the experience of travel and the sensation of being in love. He suggests that both experiences heighten our awareness and make us more attuned to the world around us, allowing us to notice the intricate details and secret patterns in our environment that we might otherwise overlook. This heightened state of awareness enriches our lives and deepens our appreciation for the present moment.
In practice
During a speech about the joys of adventure, this quote could illustrate the transformative power of travel.
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.
I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.
A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.
As a traveler, I've often found that the more a culture differs from my own, the more I am struck by its essential humanity.
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.
The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.
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