We tend to expect great things from “seeing the world” and “getting experience.” A Roman poet remarked that travelers change their sky but not their soul. Other poets, untraveled and inexperienced, Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, prove Lao Tzu’s point: it’s the inner eye that really sees the world.
[& here’s the text by Lao Tzu that occasioned the above:]
LOOKING FAR
You don’t have to go out the door
to know what goes on in the world.
You don’t have to look out the window
to see the way to heaven.
The farther you go,
the less you know.So the wise soul doesn’t go, but knows;
doesn’t look, but sees;
doesn’t do, but gets it done.