Where you are shapes who you are. If you’ve ever hiked a virgin forest and felt an unexpected sense of well-being, you have experienced the power of place. If you’ve ever visited a foreign country for the first time and felt an odd yet undeniable sense of familiarity, you have experienced the power of place. If you have ever vacationed in some faraway land and thought, with uncommon conviction, I could be happy here, you have experienced the power of place.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of geography’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, it is more alive than ever. In ways large and small, our surroundings shape our lives. Our productivity, happiness, and creativity are all functions of place.

For as long as I can remember, I have been a place person. My mood and vitality correlate perfectly with my surroundings. I am repelled by some places and feel a strong, almost magnetic, attraction to others.

Places are more than coordinates on a map. They are repositories of value, physical manifestations of abstractions — love, regret, redemption, and much more. Different places suggest different ways of being in the world.

Places are not passive, though. We don’t occupy them. We interact with them, consciously or not. How we interact matters. Are we attuned to our surroundings or do we sleepwalk through them, oblivious to the beauty, and meaning, they contain?Places matter only to the extent we let them.

Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, California, “there is no there there.” A clever line, and perhaps a true one in Stein’s time, but it is not our problem today. There is plenty of there there, and not only in Oakland. The problem is that we are not there, not fully. We are estranged from place. Not any place in particular but from the experience of being somewhere, anywhere. Distracted by social media and sundry other digital detritus, we are unmoored, unplaced. This disconnect has come at a great cost, both personally and as a nation.

Our task is to render ourselves susceptible to the power of place. How? By pausing and soaking up our surroundings, and with at least five senses. By relearning how to be where your feet are. By recovering our ability to wander, and wonder.

I intend on shining a bright and generous light on this phenomenon in my new Substack newsletter, A Sense of Place. I’ll pay special attention to “Thin Places.” Thin Places are where the distance between heaven and Earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever. Thin Places change us.

Over the years, I’ve grown fascinated by this concept. I’ve traveled to many Thin Places, wrote this piece for The New York Times and, now, am embarking on a book project about the phenomenon. I invite you to wander and wonder with me. Follow me on the road, from the concert halls of Vienna to the Empty Quarter desert of Oman to Bodhgaya, that paper-Thin Place in India where the Buddha attained enlightenment.

So, is A Sense of Wander a newsletter about travel? Yes, but not in the conventional sense. The point of travel is not to get from point A to point B, nor is “the journey the destination,” regardless of what the T-shirts say.

We travel, as Henry Miller observed, to acquire “a new way of looking at things.” Happiness. Creativity. Solace. Meaning. These, and more, are the fruits of traveling well. And it is the fare I will be chewing on here, in this place.

I invite you to pull up a chair and join me.