Name Literary Non-fiction

The World Traveller

After my “year off to travel,” which had turned into three years, I had
imagined that with my entrance into the 9 to 5 corporate work force that my
travel days were over. Because I loathed the idea of sitting behind the wheel of a
barely moving car in traffic for hours every day, I opted to take public
transportation, and that single decision made enough of a difference in my quality
of life, and appealed to my sense of novelty and adventure just enough that I was
able to remain gainfully employed in corporate America for some twenty years. I
had always had a sense of adventure, and from youth onward my sensibilities had
always been focused out, beyond, and up. I had learned to keep my eyes on the
horizon, to always look towards where I was heading, rather than at where I
currently was. But following this radical lifestyle change, my daily commute
taught me to look closely at what lay right in front of me. I may have no longer
been able to go to the world, but by stepping onto the subway every morning, I
soon found that the world was regularly delivered up to me.
A typical experience would be me standing on the train, gripping a support bar
just above the hand of a man wearing a kaftan, and during the two minutes in
which we occupied the same space, I would strike up a conversation. Where was
he from? How had he come to be here? Where was he going? I found that people
were generally happy to be noticed, flattered to be approached in conversation,
and appreciative that I appreciated something about them in a country that
usually overlooked or ignored them. People told me about their home countries,
their parents, and their children. They shared their food with me. They let me
listen through their headphones at their music. I began to make notes about who
I had met and where they were from, and there came a day, after about ten years
of these daily globetrots that I realized that I had met an individual from every
country then recorded to be in existence on the globe. In a decade of traveling
essentially in circles underneath of a single American city, I had managed to make
a virtual tour of the world.
1. What does the narrator say is her defining quality? _________________________
2. How did she employ this quality to “make a virtual tour of the world?”
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