“Journeys are the midwives of thought…Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks – charged with listening to music, for example, or following a line of trees.”

Alain de Botton articulates in detail a great deal of thoughts that have already crossed my mind in his book The Art of Travel. I often find myself daydreaming in class, while driving, while walking, while reading, etc. This can create circumstances that become a learning experience, but it can also cause me to overlook potential knowledge right in front of me. I am fortunate enough to live in a time where a good majority of questions that have derived from daydreaming or “spacing out” can be searched and reasonably answered by searching Google. It is no surprise that “thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks” because you’re given new material to draw from. You’re stimulating your senses. I have found myself walking/ driving/ skating past an apartment building and I start thinking about things like whether or not it’s a good location, if it’s a safe location, if I could afford to live there, and even if I know it’s out of my price range and even if I am not in need of a place to live, I will look up the complex online… I look at photos of the inside, what floorplans are available… Which leads me to other thoughts like whether or not I think I would enjoy living with that floorplan setup, what the view from the top floor looks like, what sort of people live there, if there are thin walls, if the neighbors are loud… And the process continues until I hear, see, touch, taste, or smell something that triggers a whole new thought process.

Most (if not all) people have heard the saying “the grass is always greener on the other side” and I feel as though de Botton touches on this matter in an elegant way (though I suppose it was more of the person he was quoting that could make it seem that way). He incorporates history throughout this book and I found myself relating to the section about Charles Baudelaire intensely. I moved around from city to city when I was young because my mom always thought each city was “the one” – but we always ended up back where we started. I’ve inherited that same desire to move, thinking that city will be better than the last. I actually moved to Seattle from the central coast of California for this very reason (amongst others) – thinking it was just the city I was in that was the problem. And as time passed I realized the same thing that Baudelaire did: “It always seems to me that I’ll be well where I am not, and the question of moving is one that I’m forever entertaining with my soul.” (page 32) I believe you can find happiness through traveling, but through my own personal experience, I also believe it is foolish to expect to be happy the whole time. As de Botton says, “It is easy for us to forget ourselves when we contemplate pictorial and verbal descriptions of places” (page 19) and “the key ingredients of happiness could not be material or aesthetic but must always be stubbornly psychological.” (page 25)

As I get ready to embark on my weekly (or bi-weekly) trips to Portland, I recognize that I have expectations in the back of my mind of how the trips will go. I logically realize that I will most likely not experience quite the excitement or happiness I am anticipating. Not to say I won’t be excited or happy, but rather I will encounter situations that may be intruding- such as an upset stomach, bad drivers, rude people, broken down car, etc. Although I am not going very far from Olympia, I think The Art of Travel has been a great book to get myself in the right kind of mindset for traveling. It has also inspired me to reconsider my modes of transportation. I was originally planning on just driving my car, but now I have decided to go to Portland via train at least once depending on the cost. The last time I was on a train was when I moved to Seattle 3 years and 4 months ago and the descriptions de Botton uses in chapter 2 made me very nostalgic for . If I take the train then I am also more inclined to use public transportation to get around Portland and experience the city in a different way than if I were to rely on driving the entire time. Although going to Portland won’t be anything like going to Dublin, I am looking forward to traveling to a city I have been to before and experiencing it with a whole new perspective.