The Beauty Of Being Foreign Is That

None Of The Things In Life - Like Love Or Faith - Was Arrived At By Thinking; Indeed, One Could Almost Define The Things That Mattered As The Ones That Came As Suddenly As Thunder.

The Reason I Love Travel Is Not Just Because It Transports You In Every Sense, But Because It Confronts You With Emotional And Moral Challenges That You Would Never Have To Confront At Home. So I Like Going Out In Search Of Moral And Emotional Adventure Which Throws Me Back Upon Myself And Forces Me To Reconsider My Assumptions And The Things I Took For Granted. It Sends Me Back A Different Person.

Dalai Lama Has Made New Opportunities For Women That They Never Had In Tibet, Introduced Science Into The Monks' Curriculum And Had Tibetan Students In Exile Take Their Classes In English After The Age Of Ten So That They Will Know More About The Outside World. But One Of The Great Things He's Done Is To Bring All The Tibetan Groups Together In Exile, As Perhaps They Couldn't Have Been When They Weren't In Exile And They Weren't Under Such Pressure.

And If Travel Is Like Love, It Is, In The End, Mostly Because It's A Heightened State Of Awareness, In Which We Are Mindful, Receptive, Undimmed By Familiarity And Ready To Be Transformed. That Is Why The Best Trips, Like The Best Love Affairs, Never Really End.

I'd Spent Thirty Years Visiting The Dalai Lama, And Twenty Years As A Journalist Going To Difficult Places, War Zones And Revolutions From North Korea To Haiti And Beirut To Sri Lanka, And The Question Came Up: What Does This Man Have To Offer To This World Which Seems So Torn Up And So Attached To Conflict?