Bernie Michalik's posterous site

Often, the place where I live seems like the place I have always been. But
other times, the sounds or the smells or the light or some other quality of
the place I stand reminds me of someplace else. This morning the sounds and
the light on the buildings, as well as the bustle, reminded me of weekday
mornings in Manhattan. Yet the air temperature and the light reminded me of
autumn in Cape Breton. The combination of sensations lifted me out of the
daily commuting thoughts and made me look at the street in new ways. It
made it fresh.

As much as travel is great in that you see new places and learn new things
and meet new people, what travel also does is sow sensations into your
memory that makes it possible for one place to seem like many places, in a
sense. It allows you to be in many places at the same time. You live in all
of the world, all at once.

As I was walking down the street to get a coffee, I recalled the lyrics
from "Once in a Lifetime", where David Byrne sings: you may find yourself
living in a shotgun shack, or a beautiful house, and you may ask yourself:
how did I get here? And as I sat down with my cappuccino in my local Aroma
cafe, I was in Toronto, and Florence, and Paris, Glace Bay, Istanbul,
Montreal, Dallas and many of other places. Hamlet proclaimed: I could be
bound in a nutshell and in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite
space (were it not for his bad dreams). As for me, I could sit anywhere in
a coffee shop and consider myself a patron of infinite coffee shop (as long
as the coffee is good and the morning sunlight streaming in through the
window is warm).

Thanks for reading this. Enjoy your morning coffee, and be happy, wherever
you may find yourself.
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Sent from my BlackBerry Handheld.