I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, “’T is all barren!”

When every place you go turns out to be dull, the common factor is you. Some of what you find in a landscape, a city, a job, is what you bring the capacity to notice. Someone who arrives certain there is nothing here will be right every time, and the rightness proves nothing.

Take somewhere you have written off, the commute or the meeting you dread, and go into it this week looking for one specific thing. A detail, a person’s habit, a piece of its history. Interest is trainable, and it usually starts with looking longer than is comfortable.