Looking forward to Easter: escape from London.
Usually don't allow myself to look forward this much. It feels like wishing the time (the days between now and the Paddington train on Friday morning) away.
So much talk at the moment about mindfulness and living in the present. Of course. But maybe the anticipation of a journey, and looking forward to a journey, is a very important part of travel (whether mental or physical).
Alain de Botton (have finished The Art of Travel ) disagrees. He argues that it's like believing the photos in the holiday brochures are true - the empty Caribbean beaches fringed with palms.
"... valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying of embellishing, thus lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in teh distrcting woolliness of the present."
Yes perhaps. But there may be a half-way house here somewhere. Thoughts that lift and strengthen the mood can't be bad.
Usually don't allow myself to look forward this much. It feels like wishing the time (the days between now and the Paddington train on Friday morning) away.
So much talk at the moment about mindfulness and living in the present. Of course. But maybe the anticipation of a journey, and looking forward to a journey, is a very important part of travel (whether mental or physical).
Alain de Botton (have finished The Art of Travel ) disagrees. He argues that it's like believing the photos in the holiday brochures are true - the empty Caribbean beaches fringed with palms.
"... valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying of embellishing, thus lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in teh distrcting woolliness of the present."
Yes perhaps. But there may be a half-way house here somewhere. Thoughts that lift and strengthen the mood can't be bad.
