On being a stranger in a familiar land

The pleasure of traveling within

Mar 05, 2021

Very few of us have traveled this past year. For many of us, the restricted movement has provided much-needed rest and family time. And yet, being homebound has its challenges. As one friend put it, “I am very familiar with the cracks on my ceilings and walls.”

This weekend, Joe and I walked through NYC, our home of 25 years, as though we were out-of-towners. We took our time. We stood in front of a store window looking at vintage Italian motorcycles and made up stories about the people who might buy them. We stood in the rain watching traffic crawl up Tenth Avenue. I noticed how the cobblestone streets in the West Village converge in an unruly tangle, not like the familiar grid of the East Village. I drank in the Hudson River sunset. We were a mile from home, and we were in a different world.

For a single day, the shuttered businesses of NYC did not weigh on my heart. We walked by beloved brunch spots and the family-owned store where our girl’s got their first hard-soled shoes, all boarded up. But in tourist mode, I didn’t think about what had been lost. Instead, I saw exactly what was in front of me. I noticed architecture, trees outgrowing their sidewalk homes, pigeons circling overhead, and disappearing in the sunlight. My body was alert, all my senses engaged with new delights on every block.

The tourist has gotten a bad rap— the bumbling American in a Hawaiin shirt with a zoom lens ignorant of the cultural norms—but do not disparage her indiscriminately; the tourist is primed for awe. Tourists travel for pleasure, not business. In tourist mode, we judge less, observe more. We are open to experience without expectation. Being a tourist does not require physical travel. Being a tourist is a state of mind.

The 19th-century American poet and physician Oliver Wendall Holmes once said, “Man’s mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension.” This adage is quite literally true. When we are exposed to novel environments, where we must react to new stimuli and navigate new sensations, our brains sprout dendrites. Dendrites are the extension of nerve cells that communicate with one another and with the cells throughout our body. Travel involves so many new stimuli--sights, smells, sometimes sensations--that when we are a stranger in a strange land, these dendrites grow like tree branches reaching for sunlight, enhancing our memory and awareness.

Our brains are marvelously plastic and wired to continually grow, but we need to create the conditions for that to happen. What if I were to become a tourist in my own body? What if I had never before experienced gravity and I didn’t know how to coordinate the liftoff required to leap over the puddle at my feet. What if I watch my arm open an umbrella and marvel at the dexterity and precision of that simple act.

What if we could meet one another’s bodies in that way, with a beginner’s mind and full of awe? I am reminded of the Cantina scene in Star Wars, the one where every creature has different body parts arranged in magnificent ways and they are milling about an intergalactic bar. I imagine those characters getting to know one another: Tell me what your blue snout feels like when I touch it and I’ll show you how my antenna swivels with delight when you honk. What if we explored our bodies as though we were from another planet and everything was strange and new.

I was sure my dendrites had grown into a full jungle by the time I returned home. Hungry for new experiences, I decided to maintain my tourist perspective in our overly familiar apartment, and it worked. I didn’t see a too-small space with too many jackets on the hooks and dishes in the sink. Rather, I wondered who lived there and what was important to them, I wanted to hear the music they listened to, and learn what they talked about around the kitchen table.

I saw our girls not as children I knew inside and out but as fabulously intriguing houseguests. I probed them with a fresh curiosity about their lives, their friends. I pretended I didn’t know about the six hours of screen time they’d indulged in rather than the homework they were meant to do. Instead, I wondered what new worlds they might reveal to me, and what they themselves were discovering.

It’s easy to be a tourist when things are new. It’s more challenging to be a tourist in the places that are most familiar; our homes, our beds, our own internal landscapes of thoughts and emotions. To remind us of how we can do that, I offer this: we are all tourists, every day, on this planet. This big round ball has been here for 4.5 billion years. We humans arrived on the scene 200,000 years ago. A fraction of a second on the universal clock. In this way, we are all just passing through. Let’s not forget to take a little pleasure on this trip.

Thank you for reading and thank you to all of you who have shared your thoughts with me. The Pleasure Report is a weekly newsletter about the science, art, and politics of feeling good. We are a work in progress and a small team. Your support means the world to us and will help us grow. We’ve got some big plans for this endeavor.

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On being a stranger in a familiar land

The pleasure of traveling within

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