You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you.

What you get out of a place, a book or an evening depends heavily on what you arrive carrying. Nothing supplies meaning to someone who has none to lend it, which is why the same trip delights one person and bores another, and why a dull week is sometimes a fact about the attention rather than the week. This is not a demand to be enthusiastic about everything. It is a reminder that the condition of the viewer is half the picture.

Before something you expect to be flat, spend two minutes deciding what you want to notice in it. The effort is small and it changes what comes back.