21 Jan In the Sensuous Classroom of the World
The greatest gift of my undergraduate education was a truth I discovered one sunny June morning shortly after graduation. I had gone to Paris on a three-month internship arranged by the Princeton Summer Work Abroad Program. As I would do every morning, I took the rickety old filigreed elevator from my apartment—right on the rue de Rivoli, looking onto the Tuileries—and stepped into the street: into a sea of French. Everyone around me was speaking French, wearing French, looking French, acting French. Shrugging their shoulders and twirling their scarves and drinking their cafés crèmes, calling out “Bonjour, messieurs-dames” when they stepped into shops and paying for Le Monde or Le Nouvel Observateur with francs and stepping importantly around me and staring straight into my eyes and subtly smiling in a way that only the French do.
© akarelias
Until that time I had spent most of my life in classrooms, and I was planning after that European detour to spend most of the rest of my life in classrooms. Suddenly it struck me: This was the classroom. Not the musty, shadowed, oak-paneled, ivy-draped buildings in which I had spent the previous four years. This world of wide boulevards and centuries-old buildings and six-table, sawdust restaurants and glasses of vin ordinaire and fire-eaters on street corners and poetry readings in cramped second-floor bookshops and mysterious women smiling at you so that your heart leaped and you walked for hours restless under the plane trees by the Seine. This was the classroom.
That lesson changed the course of my life, and led me to a complementary truth: Travel heightens the world.
By this I mean not just that travel enhances our understanding of history and artistic accomplishment and spiritual belief, though of course all these are true. I mean that on a much more fundamental, minute-to-minute level, travel heightens our sensuous appreciation of the world. The purple lavender of Provence, the plaintive pluck of a shamisen in Tokyo, the sizzling scent of skewered chicken on an alley in Yogyakarta, the cool coarse bark of a venerable redwood on a Muir Woods morning—all these sense-lessons are burned indelibly into my brain, and in intricate and subtle ways, each of them deepens my daily journey.
Travel lifts us out of the humdrum familiarity of everyday life and thrusts us into a new context, literally a new world. Whenever I arrive in a new place, even groggy with jet lag, all my senses jangle. The call of a muezzin echoes over the rooftops of Peshawar, the swash of the Andaman Sea calls me from a Thai beach bungalow, the humid, hibiscus-scented air embraces me in Hawaii my heart pumps faster, my brain and body hungrily absorb these new offerings from the planet’s curriculum.
As we absorb more, our senses become even more acute, and we become wider, deeper, richer people. Life takes on a sharpness and fullness that had been dulled or displaced at home.
And if we learn our lessons well, we bring that sharpness and fullness back with us when we return home. And if we learn our lessons very well, one day we step into the street—and discover that the sensuous classroom is all around us, wherever we may be.
Adventures you might like:
Exploring Patagonia | Off the Beaten Path
Latest posts by Don George (see all)
- Surrendering to Seven Sights in Chile’s Patagonia - September 20, 2017
- Enchanted by Chile: Three Wine Country Wonders - August 16, 2017
- The Importance of Travel in Turbulent (and Not So Turbulent) Times - June 3, 2017
No Comments