“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” 
? Henry Miller

For the last two weeks I have been traveling. I was privileged to spend time in the south of England before walking along a path known as the Cotswold Way. Spending my days among places and people I did not know allowed me once again to remember one of the true gifts of travel. Navigating streets and fields, hills and valleys that have known a life outside anything I had experienced confronted me with the fact that we live in a diverse, multi-layered world filled with people whose lives are so very different than my own. Ways of getting from one place to another is different. Clothing takes on a variety that can be startling and surprising, beautiful and eye-stopping. Sounds fall in new ways on the ear. Foods common to those in the place you are visiting seem exotic. 

All this combines to create a sense of humility in me. Noticing the ways that other people move through their world in ways that are so different than my own helps me to realize how wide my lens needs to stretch to be a true citizen of the world. Coming face to face with all I don’t know about the wants and needs of others is humbling. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert puts it this way: “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” 

Of course, a person really does not need to leave home to realize this. Yet I am feeling thankful for the opportunity because in the every day walk of my life it is easy to think others see the world pretty much the same as I do, experience it with the same enthusiasm, boredom or anxiety as I do. When placed on soil not our own, challenged to navigate language and life with the hope of being welcomed or at least tolerated, I believe our hearts and minds expand. And in the world in which we are living right now, this seems a very good thing to me. 

Travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer says: “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.” 

Today I am grateful to have been ‘taken in’. I am feeling blessed to have sensed my heart and eyes opened even a little, to have looked past headlines and news stories and seen the beautiful humanity with which we spin on this globe. It is a sacred wake up call. I hope I offered what I could… in my ignorance and what little I know. And I hope and pray that it has brought me to the place of being a young fool again, one who can fall in love once more with this world, this planet, these humans, this life with which we each have been gifted.