Getting ready for a three-week journey, I’m thinking about fresh ways to think. In that, I’m helped along by writer Pico Iyer, a fascinating author who at first blush seems to be writing about travel, but has something to say about various qualities of human experience. Here are a couple of quotes to give a flavor:
On travel: We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity — and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).
I also like this, part of an interview he did published in Nautilus in January: I am an optimist, though my sense is that optimism is only as useful as the realism it’s based on.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 