Advice

If I could encourage my friends and family and all the students I have and will ever teach to do one thing, it would be to travel. To see and understand for themselves what it means to see foreign peoples in their native element. To see all the many ways that people express their loves for their land, for their customs, for themselves and their families. To go beyond the intellectual experience of printed words in our heads, and to enrich imagination and soul and heart through the vivid experience of embodied sight, smell and sound. Nothing can truly prepare you for this, nobody can every truly tell you what only your own particular eyes and ears and heart and brain can tell you and teach you about this world, with all its peculiarities and particularities, with all its universalisms and generalisms, with all its splendour and wonder yet to be felt by you, new and different every day from my own experience.