Love Affair

We travel, initially,to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again ‐‐  to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. Yet the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything we thought we knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end