Where do you come from? It's such a simple question, but these days, of course, simple questions bring ever more complicated answers. And if "Where do you come from?" means "Where were you born and raised and educated?" then I'm entirely of that funny little country known as England. And if "Where do you come from?" means "Where do you pay your taxes? Where do you see your doctor and your dentist?" then I'm very much of the United States, and I have been for 48 years now. And if "Where do you come from?" means "Which place goes deepest inside you and where do you try to spend most of your time?" then I'm Japanese, because I've been living as much as I can for the last 25 years in Japan.

And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil. If somebody suddenly asks me, "Where's your home?" I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be. I literally couldn't point to any physical construction. My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me.

And I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. You can't take anything for granted. Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked "on." Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home become something different.

Vocabulary:

Voyage, consist in