Alain De Botton on The Benefits of Being Away From Home:
"Though we tend to love our homes and think of them as anchors
of identity, there are also disturbing ways in which they can
fix us unhelpfully to a version of ourselves we no longer wish
to side with. The familiar curtains and pictures subtly insist
that we should not change because they do not, our well-known
rooms can anaesthetise us from a more urgent, necessary
relationship with particular questions.
It may not be until we have moved across an ocean, until we are
in a hotel room with peculiar new furniture and a view onto a
motorway and a supermarket full of products we don't recognize
that we start to have the strength to probe at certain
assumptions. We gain freedom from watching the take-offs and
landings of planes in a departure lounge or from following a
line of distant electricity pylons from a train making its way
a cross barren steppes. In the middle of a foreign landscape,
thoughts come to us that would have been reluctant to emerge in
our own beds. We are able to take implausible but important
leaps, encouraged by the changes around us, from the new
lightswitches to the cyrillic letters blinking in illuminated
signs all around us.
Being cut loose from the habitual is the essential gift of
travel,as uncomfortable as it may be psychologically fruitful.
Christianity once took our feelings of dislocation and placed
them at the heart of a thesis as to the spiritual benefit
of pilgrimages. Without accepting the church's analysis,
we may nevertheless be inspired by its approach to the value of
feeling like a lonely outsider. As much as any destination,
it is isolated periods in untried hotel rooms, in paleozoic
canyons,in disintegrating palaces and empty service station
restaurants that facilitate an underlying psychological or
spiritual point of our journeys."
via
of identity, there are also disturbing ways in which they can
fix us unhelpfully to a version of ourselves we no longer wish
to side with. The familiar curtains and pictures subtly insist
that we should not change because they do not, our well-known
rooms can anaesthetise us from a more urgent, necessary
relationship with particular questions.
It may not be until we have moved across an ocean, until we are
in a hotel room with peculiar new furniture and a view onto a
motorway and a supermarket full of products we don't recognize
that we start to have the strength to probe at certain
assumptions. We gain freedom from watching the take-offs and
landings of planes in a departure lounge or from following a
line of distant electricity pylons from a train making its way
a cross barren steppes. In the middle of a foreign landscape,
thoughts come to us that would have been reluctant to emerge in
our own beds. We are able to take implausible but important
leaps, encouraged by the changes around us, from the new
lightswitches to the cyrillic letters blinking in illuminated
signs all around us.
Being cut loose from the habitual is the essential gift of
travel,as uncomfortable as it may be psychologically fruitful.
Christianity once took our feelings of dislocation and placed
them at the heart of a thesis as to the spiritual benefit
of pilgrimages. Without accepting the church's analysis,
we may nevertheless be inspired by its approach to the value of
feeling like a lonely outsider. As much as any destination,
it is isolated periods in untried hotel rooms, in paleozoic
canyons,in disintegrating palaces and empty service station
restaurants that facilitate an underlying psychological or
spiritual point of our journeys."
via