"'To learn something new,' the wise explorer John Burroughs noted, 'take the path that you took yesterday.' A knowing friend in New York sent me that line..."

"... when he heard that I’d spent 26 years in the same anonymous suburb in western Japan, most of that time traveling no farther than my size 8 feet can carry me.... I never dreamed that I’d come to find delight in everything that is everyday and seemingly without interest in my faraway neighborhood, nothing special.... It’s the end of things, Japan has taught me, that gives them their savor and their beauty. And it’s the fact that my wife — and I — are always changing, even as we’re shedding leaves and hair, that confers an urgency on my feelings toward her.... Every year, autumn sings the same tune, but to a different audience. My first year in Japan, I wrote a book about my enraptured discovery of a love, a life and a culture that I hoped would be mine forever. My publishers brought out my celebration of springtime romance in autumn. Now, 28 years on, I’m more enamored of the fall, if only because it has spring inside it, and memories, and the acute awareness that almost nothing lasts forever. Every day in autumn — a cyclical sense of things reminds us — brings us a little bit closer to the spring."

From "The Beauty of the Ordinary/We treasure autumn days as reminders of everything we must not take for granted" by Pico Iyer (in the NYT). If you hesitate to click through, know that there's a fantastic gently animated illustration of a fallen leaf (by Angie Wang). Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England and is of Indian ancestry. He's written novels and books about his extensive travels. But since 1992, he's lived in Nara, Japan. From his Wikipedia page:

Having grown up a part of — and apart from — English, American and Indian cultures, he became one of the first writers to take the international airport itself as his subject, along with the associated jet lag, displacement and cultural minglings.... Most of his books have been about trying to see from within some society or way of life — revolutionary Cuba, Sufism, Buddhist Kyoto, even global disorientation — but from the larger perspective an outsider can sometimes bring....