Chapter One
Choose a Journey With Edges
A journey begins when you decide what it is allowed to leave out. Before the ticket, before the bag, there is the dangerous little sentence, While I am there, I might as well. It can turn a week into a relay race. Every place added to the route asks for a departure, an arrival and the work between. A map conceals that work with a thin line.
Think of a trip as a sequence of days rather than a row of pins. On a day with a transfer, the hours you can spend elsewhere are fewer than the timetable suggests. You still need to find the departure point, wait, travel, orient yourself on arrival and perhaps carry a bag to a place where you can put it down. None of that is wasted time. It is the material of the journey. It becomes waste only when you promise those hours to something else as well.
The first choice is therefore a limit. Give the trip one clear centre. It could be an old friend, a coastline, a language you want to hear outside a classroom, a series of train windows, or an afternoon in a city you have known only by its airport. Name the centre in a sentence. If you cannot, you may be collecting destinations because they are near one another on a screen, not because they belong to your trip.
