ONE: Travel to wonderland
Use the rabbit hole. Go where the magic is: visit Disneyland or the Harry Potter Studios or Il Giardino dei Tarocchi, fly a kite on the beach, spend a week in an old mill in the middle of nowhere, camp in the desert and bathe in the Milky Way at night. Travel back to yourself. Recapture the world as it looked before you grew up and started being reasonable about things.
TWO: Return to your happy place
You must have one. A cabin, a lake, a farmhouse in a vineyard, a specific city in a specific season, a table with a particular view, maybe a person. Return as many times as you can. Or, when you’re brave enough, move there.
THREE: Travel with your best friend
Friendship and discovery never grow old. Family travel and romantic travel are their own thing, sometimes more magnetic, more poetic, more instructive. But never quite as free. Never quite as fun.
FOUR: Take your parents somewhere they never hoped to see
Or your grandparents. Somewhere that would have seemed impossible to them once. Watch the world widen in their eyes that had seen so much already. It will become a new kind of happy for you too.
FIVE: Best gift ever
Plane tickets. Best gift. Every time.
SIX: Ground your senses
In a world of screens, touch the earth. Spend a morning picking oranges in an orange grove, help the villagers during vendemmia, or make some pasta with the nonna. Let your hands do something ancient.
SEVEN: French kiss and street-dance in Paris
Is it a cliché? Of course it is, that’s the whole point. Paris is a stage that demands a performance. Kiss in the street, dance on the bridge, make a scene. Public displays of romance have been at home here for a thousand years – and counting.
EIGHT: Have a beach all to yourself in Portugal
It’s a crash course in what freedom actually feels like: huge, scary, character-building, seductive. Cold Atlantic water, white sand, no one for miles. You’ll remember it like a happy scar.
NINE: Sail along the coast of Sardegna
From La Maddalena to Tavolara. The sea there has all the blue you need and the islands are these fantastic animals that have no name in any language.
TEN: Dine al fresco on the rooftops of Florence
The most beautiful city below, the wine red, the light going gold over it all. You are dining inside a living Renaissance masterpiece — and you know she knows it.
