It’s okay to 'waste' your travel returning to the same place

“Why do you always go back to the same place? Don’t you ever want to see something else?” 

Someone asked me this after (another) recent trip to France. The question had an edge, implying that I’d been wasting opportunities that I “should” apply elsewhere. But is “seeing something” the ultimate good of travel? Or can something deep and transcendent happen when we aim past seeing into knowing? 

You’ve probably heard the maxim, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a single page.” There’s a lot of good insight there about expanding your experience and the things we can learn only outside of our usual experience. Yet our culture often views travel as an achievement, in which pure quantity matters most. The more boxes you’ve checked, the more you’ve achieved.

This version of travel can easily become an idol that feels empty and unsatisfying, even as you rack up destinations. I believe there’s another point to travel: deep encounter, which happens most fully with time and presence. Returning to the same place is how you really encounter it, know it, and ultimately allow yourself to be pierced by it. When we are pierced, we are made more open to everything that matters most. 

As a little girl, I saw a photo in my Grandpa's coffee table book of an ancient marble sculpture that captured my heart.  It was an ancient winged sculpture without a head or arms, yet vibrating with motion. Her marble robes clung sheer and wet to her belly, a miracle of artistry. When I later walked into my first high school art class, I saw her again as a poster on the teacher’s desk. I learned that the sculpture had a name: Nike of Samothrace, sometimes called Winged Victory, and that she lived in the Louvre in Paris. A dream to go there and see her swelled in my young heart. 

I didn’t make my first visit to Paris until late college after carefully saving money and class credits for a semester abroad. My heart broke when I found the Louvre closed on strike that first trip, then again on my second attempt later in the semester. (Seriously?!) On a third trip—one my new husband and I had pinched and saved for—I finally saw Nike for the first time.

Seeing Nike turned out not to be enough. 

Standing beneath her feathers both satisfied something deep in my heart and made me yearn for more. This is the whole point of beauty, after all: to foreshadow Heaven while also making us hungry for eternity. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “Beauty unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond.”

At the time, I felt pretty certain that this trip to Paris would be my last, so with only two hours in the Louvre, I tried to absorb enough Nike to fill my soul for a lifetime. But I knew it wouldn’t work. Encountering beauty only deepened my desire for more. 

Because God gives gifts beyond measure, I’ve since returned to France again and again—always beginning in Paris and almost always making a visit to the Louvre. Along with Nike, the Louvre also houses countless other iconic pieces, so upon my first few returns, I’d run around and try to see as many of them as possible. Shouldn’t I take advantage of the opportunity to see something else? Wouldn’t it be a waste to be right there and not see Venus de Milo or Mona Lisa or Raft of the Medusa?

Yet none of those works, important as they are to the world, pierced me like Nike. Making the goal “seeing as much as possible” felt dull and hasty, not transcendent. So the last several times I’ve visited the Louvre, I’ve done something different that may seem like a “waste”: I go straight to the Denon wing, up the back stairs to avoid the thickest crowds, and simply sit under Nike for a few hours. I move from one side of her to the other, gazing at her angles, but I go nowhere else and see no other works. Sitting in silence and contemplating just one beautiful thing feels almost like making a holy hour, and the prayer that surges forth is real. Nike’s beauty has not grown exhausted or boring by returning to her again and again, but rather more powerful in stirring me to transcendence. 

Maybe you feel pulled to a certain place that pierces you—a Smoky Mountain cabin, a cottage in Yorkshire, maybe even Disney. Maybe you’ve been asked, Don’t you ever want to see something else?  Maybe you fret that you’re wasting your travel budget and time by doing the same thing over and over. 

But the true waste is spending your time and resources somewhere that doesn’t pierce you. 

Meet me in Paris?

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