Doris is a world-traveler in a league of her own. She has been to 180 countries, many of them multiple times. Most shockingly, for the past twenty years, she has been traveling for about half a year every year. She is the female equivalent of Ibn Battuta, the greatest traveler in history, the only difference being that he traveled continuously whereas she does it piecemeal.
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I was crossing paths with a kindred spirit whose life lay at the extremes of my own endeavor, at the very end of the spectrum of freedom. For a moment, I felt that because of this special yet invisible connection between us, I was given an honorary glimpse into his unorthodox and unique life.
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There is a recent worldwide bias against Big. Big alienating cities are worse than small beautiful villages.[1] A big fat guy is bad; fashion-model-thin is good. A big meal is bad for your health – “eat light.” Small, boutique hotels – good. Big hote …
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Centuries-old traditional tanneries I had been searching for the Arabia of my childhood imagination for a long time. I had searched for the archetypal magical world of the 1001 Arabian Nights, “The Thief of Baghdad,” the magic carpets, the mysterious …
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Aesop gave a bad name to the cicadas. In one of his well-known fables, he talks about a cicada who is lazy all summer, doing nothing but singing under the trees. The cicada urges an ant, who is busy working to store food for the winter, to stop for a …
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The Wormhole Kwaio tribe, Malaita, Solomon Islands I sit in the simple hut with the parents. Outside, it is pouring rain. Through the hut’s small entrance, which looks like a small window, I see, as if in a mirage from another era, naked children pla …
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When you travel, you encounter new words that open doors to new worlds. But you also re-examine words you thought you knew, which suddenly acquire completely new meanings. Quetzal, the first of the following two short essays, belongs to the first typ …
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It’s very painful to see how small betrayals can gradually eat away at our soul. We see people who haven’t made any big mistakes in their lives, perhaps a recurrent stubbornness, little mistakes that they insist on making over and over again. But the …
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The little faucet-stream of water was running on my shaving brush, while from my bathroom window I could see a menacing thunderstorm approaching. After a few minutes, the sky darkened and it started pouring rain. I stopped shaving for a moment to enj …
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Quito, Ecuador, 2006 I’m sitting in the waiting room of the Visa Department of the Interior Ministry of Ecuador. Facing me on the opposite wall is a photo of a clay pot, decorated with all sorts of ornamental figures. I realize that it was crafted by …
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The other day I wasn’t sure I existed. So I googled myself to be sure I did. There was my face, my book, my speeches, my interviews, even “my quotes” – selected excerpts from my book on Goodreads. I existed, alright! For the first time in my life (an …
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“There is no linear evolution; there is only circumambulation of the Self.” – Carl Jung Ever since that portentous moment when man first developed self-consciousness, he has been creating models to understand both the world and himself. Whether it be …
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Each one of us is a circle. In this circle we collect and enclose, as if they were little pebbles, all of our loves, interests, aims, dreams, preoccupations. We are an amalgam of many elements put together as a result of random events, choices, and c …
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All of us live two separate lives. These lives inhabit two different worlds. So, we live simultaneously in two different dimensions! In one life we write, or compose, or think, or create, or solve complicated problems, or philosophize. In the other w …
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There are two ways of living: by reacting or by acting. Reacting is imitating. Acting is being creative. Reacting is saying “it is in my nature to behave thus.” Acting is saying “I have no fixed nature.” Reacting is succumbing to the biological laws …
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You often hear phrases like “I have found my other half,” “I felt incomplete until I met you,” “I have been fulfilled in love,” and so on. In my case it has been exactly the opposite! Let me explain: All my life I felt “complete,” “sufficient unto my …
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We have absolute responsibility for our life. We are who we are and do the work we do and behave the way we behave and have the friends we have because of the myriad big and small choices we have made over the years. We are what we have become throug …
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You are a living transformer. First – the body. Things go in and come out. Food becomes energy, then excrement. The lungs are pistons. Air comes in, feeds the blood, air goes out. Everything entering your body is transformed by the transformer that y …
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How loudspeakers and a pick-up truck transformed my journey “What the hell?!” I thought. “Are people nuts in this town?” I had just been woken up at around midnight by very loud music coming from speakers that seemed to be just outside my bedr …
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The number of points at which you touch Life and the World is the measure of the wealth of your life. People ask themselves, “Are my days rich? Do I have a rich life?” But what they should actually be asking is, “At how many points do I touch Life?” …
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The mother of all learning is imitation and repetition. Children learn mostly by first imitating and then repeating the movements, mannerisms, facial expressions, and words of the adults or of the older siblings in their lives. One well-studied pheno …
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Ever since Heraclitus, in the sixth century BC, uttered his famous phrase “ta panta rei,” which means “everything flows” or “everything is in constant flux,” humanity has accepted Change as one of the fundamental laws that govern the cosmos. Heraclit …
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The people you meet are not really human. They are not even material bodies located in space and time. People are waves. A human being seems to be, most prominently, a physical object, a body with arms and legs, a beating heart and breathing lungs. Y …
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To drive a small scooter, one must have a driver’s license. But to raise children or rule a country, one need have nothing! Seen from the vantage point of a future observer living in the twenty-fifth century, our contemporary twenty-first century soc …
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Vara Blanca, Costa Rica, 2005 In my country it is called “Thermitron.” Here, they call it “Termo.” It is an electric showerhead that instantly heats running cold water to provide a hot shower in remote places where the installation of elaborate wate …
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West Africa, 2010 In these parts of the world, where “restaurants” are dirty shacks and they serve your food on cracked plates with dusty hands, my emergency food has become my regular one. It is condensed, nutritious, easy to prepare, and of course, …
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We have ceased to communicate, for we speak in sound bites. We have ceased to be ourselves, for we exist for the others’ gaze. We have ceased to be original for we conform to the multitude’s demands. Yet none is a more serious predicament than that.. …
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Nothing holds greater power in our life than the Unknown. The Unknown pulls us towards new life experiences, new knowledge, new human relationships – a renewed and revitalized life. The Unknown always calls us, and we can respond either by ignoring o …
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Time is this grand, unfathomable, overwhelming entity we can never truly grasp. Mysterious and all-encompassing, it forever eludes our attempts to understand it. Even when we think we are near to grasping a part of its nature, we usually find it atta …
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“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.” – Carl Jung “I remember so well the agony of being torn between my love and joy for my child, and my desperation to hang onto a sense of my self …
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“Life is given to us; every moment is given. The only appropriate response therefore is gratefulness.” – Brother David Steindl-Rast, from The Music of Silence “This world appears to us rather as a world of suffering than as a world of the delight of …
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Enough with the settled life! There is no settled life – do not fool yourselves. Restlessness is the default state of Man. When I was younger, I used to divide people into two categories: the settled and the restless. I put myself in the second categ …
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Every human connection we make remains with us forever. We cannot annul it. We cannot go back in time and make it vanish. We cannot put it aside, pretend it is not there, or even delete it from our memory. We may attempt to do any of these, but we wi …
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China – 2008 The biggest attraction of China is … me! At least while I’m here and moving around. Wherever I go (outside of the main tourist destinations), I instantly become the center of attention. Being a strange looking long-nosed, huge-eyed, hair …
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The most important thing in life is Death. Yet he seems to come from some other domain, another dimension. He is the strangest visitor in this “world of the living.” Although he seems to be a part of life, his mere appearance extinguishes it. He is b …
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Truly, we do not think, will or act but thought occurs in us, will occurs in us, impulse and act occur in us; our ego-sense gathers around itself, refers to itself all this flow of natural activities. It is cosmic Force, it is Nature that forms the t …
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We live in a world of parallel universes. The universes of politics, cooking, fashion, music, parrots! Many years ago, I decided to buy a macaw parrot. A few weeks later, I found myself immersed in the “world of birds.” I began to discover this alrea …
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A chicken-bus quartet in 5 movements On board a minibus in Guatemala, from the town of Coban to the village of Uspantan in 2005, I had a wide range of experiences that led to many inspirations. Later I would write a number of essays under the general …
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Infinity is almost always associated with vast entities. We think of the universe as being situated in infinite Space; of Time as extending infinitely along a line backward (the past) and forward (the future); we imagine two parallel straight lines m …
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Last month, I was honored to participate in the annual Airbnb Open festival in Los Angeles. This weekend-long festival was a true celebration of hospitality, openness, and wanderlust. The fascinating program included the announcement of Airbnb’s new …
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As a child of the 1970s, I was fascinated by the nascent exploration of space. I spent a good part of my teenage years in bookshops searching for books that explained the American and Soviet space-programs or had amazing colour photos of the Apollo m …
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It is supposed to be the phrase that vanquishes all opposition: “But everybody does it!” Or its corollary: “But nobody does it!” Your elaborate argument, your opinion and carefully expressed points, amount to nothing. Whatever you have just said or a …
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We live in the era of sound bites. The overwhelming majority of our communication has been reduced to posts, tweets, text messages, and one-liners. Attention spans have dwindled, and argumentative reasoning has been reduced to “the final statement,” …
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It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands …
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The gaze of others defines us. So long as we are alone, we do not possess an outside vision of ourselves to which our acts can be referred; we exist within our inner being, which has no identity and no characteristics. But when others enter the pictu …
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When we learn to drive a car, we are anxious, struggle, sometimes even suffer. Most importantly, we are continuously conscious. Learning is a process in and through consciousness. When learning ends, its final reward is unconsciousness: We can drive …
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We are blinded by “name and form.” We are hooked to our understanding that is limited by our limiting definitions. We are appalled by the brutality, bestiality, inhumanness of humans; say a serial killer, with no ethical constraints whatsoever. “How …
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Every separation is a rehearsal for death. When you part with someone whom in all likelihood you will never see again, this is almost the same as him dying for you. You will never see him again and some day he will die – before or after you, it does …
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For what the Spirit sees, creates a Truth, and what the soul imagines is made a World – Sri Aurobindo Cancun, Mexico My itinerary said: “20th of October – Travel to Cancun via Chichen Itza.” Cancun: the latest tourist capital of Mexico. Chiche …
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Look at an animal – a cat, a cockroach, a fish in the ocean. All have everything they need. All are already everything they need to be. Animals are born complete. There is nothing to be added to a fish or a cockroach from the moment it is born until …
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