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Aug 28, 2006

on traveling...there is something about packing your life into a suitcase- about discovering how much fits into your "carry-on" and finding out how startlingly little you really need to- carry on, that makes me think traveling is about so much more than going new places, meeting new people. It's a form of simplicity. It is a deliberate forsaking of the luxury of the familiar, a walking away from the insidious rut of routine that we sometimes allow ourselves to slip into- not that the routine in and of itself is undesirable- but that we have stopped thinking about it. It is never a good idea to live life as a force of habit. Traveling is about forcing yourself past your comfort zone. It is an overt adventure that can at it's best wake us up to the covert journey of the traveler within. One travels with one's eyes open. One does not always live the same way. Which is why the world always seems more wonder-full when you are far away from your everyday. Why people seem friendlier and places more inviting. You bring your own welcome with you- with your presence, and the passport of your attention. When you travel it is with a rare sense of life's treasures and their transience...you know that in some very real sense you may 'never walk this way again'- and that compels you into a rapt space of absolute openness to the moment. The old man whose gaze catches yours from the window of a moving bus, the young woman who carefully counts out your change at a cornerstreet teastall, the ebb and tide and thrill and throb of life's dizzying and relentless variety- something in the traveler's heart falls in step with the magical muchness of this universe...and it is this that we fall in love with.

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