Stillness is a necessary counterbalance to movement

“In some ways, the very movement of the world around us enforces the need for stillness. Movement is almost the first act of a symphony that stillness must complete. I am interested in all the new contours and textures and possibilities of the world, but really they only make sense when we can take those little pieces of impermanence and little fragments of what is almost coming to seem like an MTV world — and turn them into something more permanent and more resonant. For me, the recollection in tranquility is much more important than the fleeting emotion. Adventure is not so much about going into the world and recording all its features as about coming back into oneself, into the stillness of one’s desk, taking the little shards of the world collected on one’s journeys and trying to make a sense of them, a shape of them, trying even to put them into a stained-glass whole.”
–Pico Iyer, from “A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World”, a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 5, 2006