Diverging roads

"Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government.  They learn, if they are lucky, humility. Experiencing on their senses a world different from their own, they realize their provincialism and recognize their ignorance." (Paul Fussell, in the Norton Book of Travel)

Flaubert said that travel made one modest because "You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world."

You discover that you can be a patriot and still acknowledge that someone else does something better. You experience the grace of individuals who do not assign to you personally all the wrongs perpetrated by your country since time immemorial.

You see that the night sky hanging over the yurt is the same one you can see in your own backyard, should you take the time to look.

By going and coming home, you discover that you are changed somehow.  You will surely shrink back into the everyday pettiness and circumcision of interest that daily life very nearly requires.  But you will not wholly forget, and in those moments when you have a small choice whether to open your mind to something new or to stay in a safe place, perhaps sometimes you will choose the former because you remember.  You remember that there are many paths, and that you can choose.