Inspiration: It's not about landscapes, it's about having new eyes

"We travel because we're natural born sensualists. Sure, we're smack-dab in a miraculously rich sensory environment without even leaving home. The local franchise coffee dispensary, if we stop fidgeting long enough to let it flow in, is a teeming universe of sense-delights. Problem is, we don't usually notice through the the habit-mist. But we do notice this incredible, unceasing flood to our senses when we travel. Sights, sounds and -probably the least honored (because they're so seemingly vestigial)--the smells, sunrise in the Himalaya. The sugs of Istanbul. Wild horses galloping across the plains of Patagonia. Dinner in Tuscany. There is no end to it.

We travel, as Chesterton said "not so set foot on foreign land (but to) set foot on one's own country as foreign land." That is, we travel to understand our normal life and land better. To appreciate them more to mine them for their joy and, yes, their unending exoticism. To look beyond what someone recently called "the narcissicism of the unspoiled place, " which contains within it the dull, life-shunning notion that the very place we live in is in somehow "spoiled." Proust said it too: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Travel gives us new eyes. It makes the old brand new."

Credit: Geographic Expeditions, San Francisco, California

Photo: Venice, Italy