WANDERLUST

Why we travel

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to found 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 be taken in, and fall in love once more.

The sovereign freedom of travelling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down and stands everything you took for granted on its head. There are, of course, great dangers in this, as in every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, travelling, we are born again, able to return at moments to a younger and more open self. Travelling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year - or at least forty-five hours - and travelling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.

So travel, at heart, is just a quick way of keeping the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it forsters humor. Buddist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, that 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.

Pico Iyer