Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

The one thing you can’t escape in your life is yourself.
Anyone who’s traveled long enough knows this. It’s eventually
clear we carry with us on the road more baggage than just our
suitcase and our backpacks.
Emerson, who in his own life traveled to England and Italy and
France and Malta and Switzerland (as well as extensively across
America), pointed out that the people who built the sights and
wonders that tourists liked to see didn’t do so while they traveled.
You can’t make something great flitting around. You have to stick
fast, like an axis of the earth. Those who think they will find
solutions to all their problems by traveling far from home, perhaps as
they stare at the Colosseum or some enormous moss-covered statue
of Buddha, Emerson said, are bringing ruins to ruins. Wherever they
go, whatever they do, their sad self comes along.
A plane ticket or a pill or some plant medicine is a treadmill, not a
shortcut. What you seek will come only if you sit and do the work, if
you probe yourself with real self-awareness and patience.
You have to be still enough to discover what’s really going on. You
have to let the muddy water settle. That can’t happen if you’re jetting
off from one place to another, if you’re packing your schedule with
every activity you can think of in order to avoid the possibility of
having to spend even a moment alone with your own thoughts.
In the fourth century BC, Mengzi spoke of how the Way is near,
but people seek it in what is distant. A few generations after that,
Marcus Aurelius pointed out that we don’t need to “get away from it
all.” We just need to look within. “Nowhere you can go is more
peaceful—more free of interruptions,” he said, “than your own soul.”
The next time we feel the urge to flee, to hit the road or bury
ourselves in work or activity, we need to catch ourselves. Don’t book
a cross-country flight—go for a walk instead. Don’t get high—get
some solitude, find some quiet. These are far easier, far more
accessible, and ultimately far more sustainable strategies for
accessing the stillness we were born with. Travel inside your heart
and your mind, and let the body stay put. “A quick visit should be
enough to ward off all,” Marcus wrote, “and send you back ready to
face what awaits you.”
Tuning out accomplishes nothing. Tune in.