Going someplace else allows you to make yourself anew. But the process of getting wherever it is you're going can be just as illuminating and rejuvenating as the stay itself. On long drives as a kid I, like my own kids today, often complained of boredom. But I have learned over the years that boredom isn't necessarily a bad thing. For boredom, especially when combined with wandering, induces wondering.

As a kid I travelled with my family each summer in the car to the Jersey shore for vacation. Ostensibly, I loved the drive and reveled in being the first one to call out our arrival at certain geographical markers along the way: the early, sparsely configured Storm King Art Center; the Star Mountainville sign; the row of little towns split in half by the Thruway; the deep green flats and hazy sky and gaping silver manufacturing plants just over the New Jersey border; Tom's River's rickety little bridge. And yet, having to remain inert for so long, forced to close my eyes or else find something to stare at, inevitably bored me into experiencing what I now recognize as a profound spiritual dislocation and the beginnings of learning about Zen.

In the car, as the hours wore on, I often felt as if I were being ripped apart from my continued sense of self in small yet painful, nearly imperceptible but completely unavoidable ways—the same way that, no matter how I tried not to, I'd rip the sweaty backs of my legs away from the vinyl upholstery and be left with a terrific sting every time I shifted in my seat. About halfway through the trip, I wouldn't be able to stand it anymore, but I'd have to. No amount of yearning to smell the ocean would make the trip end any faster, so I had no choice but to learn to bear being bored.

So I let the time on the road lull me into a state of reverie and acute awareness. If I closed my eyes, a story began forming in my mind, told to me in a voice that was at once my own and like no voice I'd ever heard before. If I focused very hard on staring at the air in between the backs of the two front seats without allowing my glance to shift even slightly, and squinted just so, I could make the world outside my window streak along my peripheral vision like endless watercolor stripes of gray road, green trees, and blue sky, splotched intermittently with the colors of cars and buildings passed along the way.

"Each mile we drive, each step we take, has to bring us into the present moment," Thich Nhat Hanh writes. "This is the practice of mindfulness." Driving, he believes, helps us find the Buddha: rather than being things that keep us from achieving the goal of reaching our destination, red lights and stop signs are bodhisattvas, "bell[s] of mindfulness," friends that help us "resist rushing," that call us "to return to the present moment where we can meet with life, joy, and peace."

Unbeknownst to me until my own kids began complaining of boredom in the backseat, my backseat rides to the beach were my first lessons in Zen, and I'm determined to pass them on. When are we going to get there? my kids still ask, even though they're older now and have moved on from Gameboy and coloring and the magnetized chessboard to personal stereos, skateboard magazines, and even conversation. I'm bored. Aren't we there yet? No, I tell them, but that's part of life. Like me at their ages, they're still not convinced of the benefits of boredom. Lounging in the car's stillness for hours on end doesn't yet seem as important as getting to the beach and stepping onto the sand and into the water. But they're learning the Zen of driving nonetheless. In the rearview mirror I've seen their fidgeting turn into long gazes out the window and their faces soften with calm, and I've heard the stories they've found within themselves, in the midst of a seemingly interminable ride, and told me when they didn't think I was looking.