This is a short note that is meant to cheer you up. The last few days have been rather grim and you may wish you were somewhere warmer. Pause for a minute, however, and remember how horrible travelling now is. As well, the intended destination may not be at all as desirable as it once was. If you are thinking about going to the Pacific, like Robert Louis Stevenson or Gauguin, recall my recent post about all the plastic now floating there.
More to the point, think more positively about "home." I buried this bit in a post back in the spring of 2019 and you may have missed it. It may help:
“Martin Martin, the traveller and writer who in the 1690s set sail to explore the Scottish coastline, knew that one does not need to displace oneself vastly in space in order to find difference. “It is a piece of weakness and folly merely to value things because of their distance from the place in which we were born,’ he wrote in 1697, ‘thus men have travelled far enough in the search of foreign plants and animals, and yet continue strangers to those produced in their own natural climate.” So did Roger Deakin: “Why would anyone want to go live abroad when they can live in several countries at once just by being in England?’ [Canada]. Likewise, Henry David Thoreau: An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.’
Source:
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Robert Macfarlane, Penguin Books, pp.78-79 & p.381.
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