About Travel

If a country is governed wisely,

its inhabitants will be content.

They enjoy the labor of their hands

and don't waste time inventing

labor-saving machines.

Since they dearly love their homes,

they aren't interested in travel.

There may be a few wagons and boats,

but these don't go anywhere.

There may be an arsenal of weapons,

but nobody ever uses them.

People enjoy their food,

take pleasure in being with their families,

spend weekends working in their gardens,

delight in the doings of the neighborhood.

And even though the next country is so close

that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking,

they are content to die of old age

without ever having gone to see it.

-- Tao te Ching 80 (Stephen Mitchell)

… Thus the Master travels all day without leaving home. 

However splendid the views, she stays serenely in herself... 

If you let yourself be blown to and fro, you lose touch with your root. 

If you let restlessness move you, you lose touch with who you are.

-- Tao te Ching 26 (Stephen Mitchell)

As has been said,

the point of travelling is not to arrive,

but to return home laden with pollen

you shall work up into the honey the mind feeds on.

What are our lives but

harbors we are continually setting out from,

airports at which we touchdown and remain in too briefly

to recognize what it is they remind us of?

And always in one another we seek

the proof of experiences it would be worthy dying for.

~ R.S. Thomas, from Somewhere