I write - though perhaps it sounds pretentious to say so - to make a clearing in the wilderness, to find out what I care about and what exactly to make of it.
Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before.
Abjure all accretions and turn off the lights. Put on some music - Leonard Cohen, say, perhaps his 'Various Positions' - and let your mind cool down. Soon you'll forget there's a word called 'stress.'
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.