When I wrote my book Life in Five Senses, I did many experiments with my senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

Of everything I tried, more than anything else I did, I was most transformed by my decision to visit the Metropolitan Museum every day for a year.

By establishing my daily visit, I used my love of discipline to give myself a break from discipline. Scheduling time for recess gave me the chance to wander. I loved this practice so much that I never stopped it, and I still visit the Met every day.

I’ve chosen a museum, but, of course, someone else might choose a different place. A park, a route through a neighborhood, a front stoop—the place doesn’t really matter. With familiarity and repetition, the world reveals itself in an unexpected way.

As for me, I chose the Met, and there I measure myself against a different scale. I feel myself rise above the trivialities of my daily life. As I read the placards’ calm references to disaster—from the sack of Rome to the death of a beloved dog—my own worries recede. Works of coral, rock crystal, burr walnut, porcupine quills, gold leaf, clay, feathers, and jade transport me with their sublime transformations of nature.

Awe is an intensely gratifying emotion, and also research shows that people who experience awe more frequently show more humility and more creativity, have a greater sense of well-being and desire to connect with others, and even have better immune health. Awe decreases anxiety and stress. 

But I don’t care about these utilitarian arguments; I visit the Met for pure joy. I feel happier from the moment I walk through its doors. It’s a paradox: I feel more deeply inside myself, yet I also feel able to slide outside myself and connect to the world. The Met has become my playground, my tree house, my snow day.

I often feel a bit guilty about grubbing through the museum in my usual yoga pants and running shoes. In his student days, famous aesthete Oscar Wilde caused a national sensation when he remarked, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” I feel the same way. I stand in front of the stern, pure God Horus Protecting King Nectanebo II and think, “How can I be worthy of it? How do I rise to the beauty of the world?” 

The best way is to reach out with my senses. No one else can visit my Metropolitan Museum.

There, nothing flashes, nothing refreshes; everything waits for me to come to it. As objects become more familiar, and as I learn more about them, they become more beautiful, so the Met slowly transforms itself beneath my gaze. And the Met is so huge, and reshapes itself so often, that I know it will never seem stale. When I returned for the tenth time to Borgianni’s Self Portrait as a Painter with Palette and Canvas, I discovered that it had disappeared. I was happy that I’d looked carefully at the painting while I had the chance.

On one unforgettable visit, as I was walking past a row of sunlit marble statues, I suddenly realized something obvious about my visits to the Metropolitan Museum: The Met was a metaphor for my entire undertaking.

When I started my project around the five senses, I’d yearned to outgrow the accidental limitations of my nature, to experience more deeply this life, my only life. My visits to the Met were my attempt to reach the places in me that I hadn’t yet discovered. There, I’d found my visible storage, my masterpieces set in illuminated cases, my neglected stairwells, my fountains, my postcards, my stone vases filled with flowers.

I am the laboratory, I am the notebook, and I am the museum.