Jul 22, 2024 3 min read Wandering 101

Should You Do More Wandering?

Charcoal pile at Bash Bish Falls. This technology probably stretches back 40,000 years.

The More You Hate the Idea...

Let's travel back in time, to the early days of Homo sapiens.

For 90% of human history, we've been hunter-gatherers, roaming large territories in small groups, using language to transmit knowledge from individual to individual and from generation to generation.

We got real smart, real fast, giving us powers of influence over the environment and enabling us to find, kill, and cook enough food to grow our population, and our brains.

Without clocks or calendars to tell us when to move, we built sophisticated internal maps to guide us and we used both our ability to reason and our intuition to know when it was time to head to seasonal hunting grounds, or when the berries would be ripe, or that a certain shade of green often cradled a particularly valuable resource.

We planned, and we also wandered.

Then came agriculture, and over the past 12,000 years, we've store-housed vast surpluses of energy, using it to grow a globally interconnected civilization of more than 8 billion, and chopping up the open lands and adding an ever-increasing number of bridges, borders, and walls.

In the process, we've lost the inherent need to wander. It's no longer how we get our calories and experience planet earth. Now, wandering is subservient to participation in industrial society.

We might wander on vacation, but at home, we spend most of our time in a loop between home, work, and a handful of other places. The wandering only happens once the dishes are clean and the laundry is folded and the work is done, and as you know that is never.

Most of us living in industrial society are over-worked, under-appreciated, overly self-critical, and wavering between bored, frustrated and terrified.

But wandering is a balm for all that.

Remember, for the vast majority of human history, we wandered a little every day. Even if we didn't range more than a few hundred feet from the camp, we had a freedom of time and movement and mind that boggles the modern mind, even though hundreds of millions of us have the means to travel to virtually any point on the planet. (We're just going to let Yelp tell us where to go once we get there.)

WE MISS WANDERING.

You can tell by how rapaciously we consume the commoditized spectacles offered up by our society.

We are looking for novelty. Looking to learn. Looking to exercise our inherent curiosity, creativity, and playfulness.

So to answer the question of this post, should you be wandering more?

Unless you're wandering so much that it's keeping you from building good daily habits, then the answer is YES. And the tighter your schedule, the more true this is.

Even the busiest business person or parent should be wandering at least a few hours a week, because it expands your perception of reality, introduces you to things you don't know you don't know, and makes you a better leader.

Wandering keeps you growing. And it also good for upping your step count, relaxing your mind and body, and it helps you keep your mental maps up to date.

But you don't have to wander today.

Tomorrow I'll share my easy wandering recipe, so you can go wander after that.

Dan Flag