Welcome Aboard [London]

In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton describes the unique approach to travel taken by an eighteenth-century French writer, Xavier de Maistre. De Maistre, who wrote two books -- Journey around My Bedroom and Nocturnal Expedition around My Bedroom -- had, De Botton suggests, 'a profound and suggestive insight': 'that the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to'. He continues:

What, then, is a travelling mindset? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. We approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is interesting. We irritate locals because we stand on traffic islands and in narrow streets and admire what they take to be strange small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the roof of a government building or an inscription on a wall. We find a supermarket or hairdresser's unusually fascinating. We dwell at length on the layout of a menu or the clothes of the presenters on the evening news. We are alive to the layers of history beneather the present and take notes and photographs.
Home, on the other hand, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about a neighborhood, primarily by virtue of having lived there a long time. It seems inconceivable that there could be anything new to find in a place which we have been living in for a decade or more. We have become habituated and therefore blind.

If, then, De Maistre and in turn, De Botton try 'to shake us from our passivity', during the next year I intend to take up their challenge. Later today I will fly to Philadelphia, returning home after living abroad for the past year. However in my case Home is a place where I haven't really lived for the past five years -- so I have a slight edge on boredom over, say, De Maistre, who after all possessed a fairly intimate knowledge of his bedroom before his adventures in 'room-travel' began.
I also don't intend to limit myself to my room, my house, or even my neighborhood, although I may undertake a few 'journeys' in those limited spaces. Instead I will focus my traveler's eye on the various curiosities, atmospheres, official and unofficial monuments throughout the city, as carefully as I have combed the streets of London this year with the idea of claiming some of it as mine. Occasionally I might write on other trips I will take or have taken in the past, to widen the view from time to time in hopes of minimizing blind spots.
In the meantime, though, I have to catch a plane.