If I’m not careful, my life slips all too sneakily into a routine: the “Twinkle” alarm goes off at 7:35am every day, the same bus is parked outside my building to shuttle me off to my office, and the same Trader Joe’s tomato soup awaits its all too familiar fate: a nuked and spooned journey to my stomach. My escape? Wandering.
Take a walk down a familiar sidewalk, acquiescing to your instincts and fancies as they guide you in a new direction and, undoubtedly, a new way of experiencing that old familiar street. To wander is to remain receptive to new ideas and unguarded with yourself, so that the ordinary turns suddenly extraordinary. To wander is also a vote of confidence in yourself: it is the belief that you will be able to stop wandering at some point and re-engage in focused, disciplined activities. It is a moment when you say that your affairs are in good enough order that you can lose yourself, if only for a while.
"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Once a day, during my lunch break at work or on unplanned afternoons on the weekend, I take walks around my neighborhood, heeding the call of empty alleyways and reminiscing at meaningful corners in such a way that it seems my city, San Francisco, exists for me alone. Sometimes I pause to sit on a park bench, dedicated to a local couple or good samaritan. I disengage from the brain space of obsessive tasks and goals and motivations, I become unfocused yet perceptive. I devise stories in my head about the people passing by, their clothing, their pace as they go traipsing about, their expressions. In this way, I flex my creative muscles and indulge in unadulterated moments of pure, unbounded absorption. I let music wash over me, or just savor the silent love of a friend or family member sitting beside me.
“Daydreaming gets a bad rap.” — David Kelley
Research on neural networks finds that this is what our brains look like on wandering: unlikely connections materialize between an idea, a memory, and an experience we’ve had, and somewhere between meditation and laser-like focus, our brains make cognitive leaps that lead to aha! moments.
In wandering, creativity flourishes. In wandering, simplicity survives.
To me, wandering is not merely a physical act, but also a state of mind. I’d like to believe it’s this physical and mental habit that allows me to stave off myopic notions and manufactured ideologies; that this habit makes me aware yet unafraid of the many paths my life might take and thus comfortable with a certain degree of mayhem.
The pinnacle of wandering is not following one particular path to success, but knowing that there are many.
I think that wandering is something I’ve inherited from my nomadic Tuareg ancestors, who wandered for the sake of survival in the extreme heat and sandy storms of the Sahara Desert. In this way, wandering not only provides an escape but also a life source, injecting curiosity and imagination into habitual existence and making muses out of unassuming things.
