I'm back in Sitges now. Only I'm not. One of the things I love the most about Road Trips is that if you spend enough of your time while on the Road Trip in mindful states of attention, when you return home "you" don't return home. Someone else does, someone newer, less prone to patterns, less likely to take things for granted.
I spent a little time last night walking my dogs around Sitges. Only -- seemingly for the dogs as well as for me -- it wasn't the same old same old Sitges. I found myself seeing it anew, as if I were a tourist visiting the place. This, after all, is how I walked my dogs in Amsterdam, and in Provence. They sniffed every Sitges tree as if it were as new and as potentially interesting to them as the trees they had sniffed in those other places. Maybe they do this every day, and I never noticed. :-) Anyway, I noticed it in my dogs last night. I also noticed it in myself. I seem to have brought home a little of that Road Trip Mindful Truckin' mindset with me, too. Whenever I'm in a place that is foreign to me, I walk a lot. Walking is, in fact, my primary source of amusement and pleasure when I'm on a Road Trip. I tend to eat like a pig but come home ten pounds lighter because of all the walking. As I walk, more often than not I find myself perform- ing a kind of made-up meditation. If I were to try to analyze it, the only goal of my made-up meditation method is to walk in as much of a "beginner's mind" or "tourist mind" state of attention as possible. I *never* walk around looking at my feet or with that 3-meter-stare that doesn't really see anything. I'm a *tourist* ferchrissakes; I want to see everything that crosses my path, and be as aware as possible when they cross my path. It's not a conscious thing; it's just what I find myself doing, walking with heightened awareness. As I walk, I watch the thoughts running through my head. Left on its own, my mind is mostly free of thoughts. When I do find myself thinking as I walk, often I find that I'm "picking up" the majority of those thoughts from the people I walk past, because they're thoughts that have no relationship to my life at all. The one thing I never seem to think about while on a Road Trip is myself. I'm totally immersed in the scenery, in the smells emanating from bakeries, in the grace of a passing beauty's walk. It's like there is no room for myself, or for thoughts of what something like a "self" might be. There is only walking silently through the world, open to what it has to show me. I like it. Hopefully I can retain this Mindful Truckin' mindstate now that I'm back here in Sitges. It *is*, after all, a "tourist town." Maybe that will remind me to be more of a tourist myself, and not slip into the rut of thinking I've got the place all figured out, and that it has nothing new to show me.
