The World of ANLY  Journal

What we remember from a place depends on how we bring ourselves to the experience and how we return to it afterwards Tea In Kyoto Two travelers sit in the same small tea room in Kyoto, and when the host turns each bowl so that its front faces them before setting it down, they receive the same tea. One has come curious about the customs and the long history behind the practice; the other has come because the room was said to be beautiful, and because an afternoon like this ma

On anticipation, and the journey that begins long before departure. There is something rather wonderful about having a journey to look forward to. It begins long before the suitcase comes down from the closet, sometimes months before the first reservation is made. It is the quiet realization, arriving on an ordinary weekday, that you finally have the time to go somewhere you have been thinking about for years. From that moment, the place begins to occupy a small corner of you

In Hawaiʻi, there is a saying about exactly that — about the second day, and the third, and what a welcome becomes when it is given time. It runs through the islands in quiet ways: in an old proverb, in a garland of flowers lifted over someone's head, in a valley on the North Shore of Oʻahu that asks its visitors to carry something out with them. What follows is a longer walk through all three.

ANLY JOURNAL The People We Keep What Día de Muertos understands about remembrance, and the small, ordinary ways we go on holding the people we love. There is a particular tenderness in setting a place for someone you know will not walk through the door. You do it not because you have forgotten they are gone, but because you have not forgotten who they were: how they took their coffee, the bread they reached for first, the chair that was always theirs without anyone ever decid

At home we spend a great deal of our lives removing uncertainty. We learn the route before we leave, read the menu before we arrive, check the reviews, make the reservation, and fill each small empty space where something unexpected might once have happened. There is real comfort in that. But there is something to be said, now and then, for not knowing.

On anticipation, arrival, and the moment a journey begins to feel like your own. There is a point in a journey when you stop arriving. The bags have been unpacked. You no longer need to think about where breakfast is or which way to turn when you leave the hotel. You have stopped checking the time quite so often. You are simply there. It turns out there may be something behind that feeling. Forty-three hours A few years ago, neuroscientist Dr. Tali Sharot worked with a touris

Come now, in the in-between. There is a moment in Kyoto that no calendar circles and no guidebook promises. It comes after the cherry blossoms have let go — after the petals have drifted onto the canals and the crowds have folded their picnic cloths and gone — and before the maples ignite the hillsides in their autumn burning. The weeks in between. Most travelers pass over this season entirely. There is no single spectacle to name, no headline to chase. And that, we have come