One of the most life-enriching treats of this spring for me was the opportunity to interview Pico Iyer on stage in Washington, DC, as part of the National Geographic Traveler Conversations series. If you’ve never heard Pico in person, it’s impossible to convey how breathtakingly eloquent he is – and how breakneckingly quickly he enunciates that eloquence. My belief is that he has a superhuman copy editor tirelessly at work in his brain, polishing his thoughts as he conceives them into flawless gems that he strings together into an unending necklace of diamonds.
Interviewing him on stage is challenging – for me, at least – for two reasons: The first is that my mind is always running to catch up to whatever profound thought he’s articulating, so that I’m constantly scrambling to conceive an appropriate follow-up question or remark; the second is that after he has said something particularly brilliant, I want to pick up the Reality Remote Control and press Pause so that I can write down what he’s just said. In our Washington conversation, there were at least half a dozen times when I really wanted to stop and say, “Pico, wait just a minute. I need to write that down.”
Pico’s thoughts are like polished pebbles that he drops into the pools of our minds, sending out infinite rings of ripples. Here are three thought-pebbles that particularly resonated for me in our National Geographic talk:
1. Travel to a foreign place is like flipping a switch; all your senses are suddenly alert.
This is absolutely true for me, and it’s one of the fundamentally addicting elements of travel. As soon as I step outside the familiar, everything suddenly zings and pops and trills; smells smell more pungently, sounds sound more acutely, tastes taste more tartly and sweetly and spicily. The newness of everything awakes and challenges me – I literally see, sense, anew. Partly, I think, this is because I’m trying to comprehend and order everything, and partly it’s because I’m simply celebrating – the newness pushes some deep joy-button that exults in the diversity of the world.This phenomenon is certainly one of the things that keeps me traveling, along with what I think of as its cognate: the limitless anonymity-possibility of travel. When we travel to a foreign place, we step outside our everyday reality, we can become whoever we want to be. These dual possibilities – of self-reinvention and of sensual-renaissance – are both intoxicating.
2. The act of note-taking means I’m paying attention.
I have always found that note-taking focuses me. It’s a two-step process: The first is all about perception. To take good notes, you first need to slow down and really perceive the thing you’re describing: Smell the air, hear the bird call, observe the details of branch and bud in the landscape, taste the café crème and the chocolate croissant. And then you need to find the right words to convey to your reader – and to yourself, when you peer at your scribbles three weeks or three months later – what is around you.
This is why on every trip I try to make time to simply sit in a place – a café, a park, a market, a meadow – for at least an hour and absorb the world around me. I sit and focus on what I’m observing — the waiter setting the cup of coffee with a slight nod just so, the white-shorted schoolboys pushing wooden sailboats in the sculpture fountain pool, the kerchiefed grandmother squeezing tomatoes and smelling cantaloupes under the stall-owner’s stare, the bees buzz-dipping from blossom to blossom – and then write it down.
These notes will later serve as memory-portals back into that moment, that place. At the same time, stopping and simply observing, absorbing, grounds me in the place so that I see, hear, smell, touch, taste more accurately, more acutely. And as I perceive more acutely, note-taking also makes me process more acutely. I ask questions: How can I describe the tint of this cafe latte? Is that a wooden sailboat or a plastic replica? What are those odd green spiky fruits over there and what do they smell like? What are those purple wildflowers called, and how can I capture the blue of the sky arching over them? Trying to note all these things forces me to pay attention. And paying attention, of course, repays me many-fold: in the living of the moment, in the recollection of that moment, in the writing of that recollection, and if I’m lucky, in the reader’s reaction to that writing.
3. Home is less a piece of soil than a piece of soul.
I have lived in five places in five decades: Connecticut, Paris, Athens, Tokyo and San Francisco. But I learned long ago that my address is not my home, the place where I physically reside is not my home, the timber and nails and stucco and glass that comprise my house are not my home. All of the places I have lived and loved are a part of me wherever I go: the woods behind my childhood house and the chicken coop my friends and I thought was a pirate outpost because of the skull and crossbones on the door; the rickety filigreed elevator that used to take me to and from my apartment on the rue de Rivoli and the waiter at the six-table corner restaurant who would bring me bifteck-frites and a glass of vin ordinaire without my asking; the little taverna under the pines on the hill outside Athens where we would eat tomato-cucumber-feta salad and drink retsina while we debated Platonic philosophy, and the red poppies and white fluted columns at Delphi where we picnicked and planned our endless futures; the downtown Ueno park where the cherry blossoms opened in evanescent splendor every spring and the people bloomed like them, sitting on quilts under the boughs, drinking and laughing and singing – all these are a part of me, wherever I am. All these are home.
“Home is less a piece of soil than a piece of soul.” Yes, home is a mosaic of soul-pieces from all the places — and people — we have loved: a mosaic that lives inside us and that transcends us at the same time, for its connections reach beyond us in all directions….
Thinking of these, I realize that like traveling to a foreign place, like note-taking, like a soul-piece of home, talking with Pico graced me with a new, renewed, sense of alertness, focus and connection. Thank you, Pico, for your ring-rippling insights and inspirations!
*****
While I didn’t have the Reality Remote Control handy that night, fortunately a number of people in the audience were capturing Pico’s polished thought-pebbles. If you want to read their accumulated notes, visit National Geographic’s Intelligent Travel blog.