What is Wandering?

Wandering is using intuition to move through territory. 

Intuition is a loose term for unconscious processing.

You can wander through a city, a forest, a field, a laboratory, a library, a book.

You can wander in base reality, or in a meta reality like the internet or a video game.

You can wander by moving.

And you can wander by staying in one place.

You can wander with your eyes open.

And with your eyes closed.

Wandering is a practice, and thus a skill which can be improved.

It helps us feel, understand, and act.

For most of our history, we've practiced wandering as part of daily life... Letting intuition guide our movements to gather resources, gain knowledge, and connect with each other. You could even say it's what made us human.

We're an animal so curious, so driven to explore, that we developed language to coordinate, consolidate, and catalogue what we learn, changing the shape of our skulls to accommodate our complex throats, tongues, and brains.

And for a million years before the invention of writing, we stored all this learning - the learning of thousands of generations of human beings - in the unconscious mind accessing it by intuition, trusting that the right feeling and thought will lead to the right action at the right time.

BUT...

For the past few centuries we've been on an analytical kick.

It's brought us lots of good things.

And some bad.

But the wanderer knows

analysis is smarter when it's backed by intuition.

Just as intuition is deeper

when it's supported by analysis.

But in this digital age...

the age of on/off...

we've begun to shun intuition

finding it inferior to the if/then reasoning.

Increasingly...

We follow phone maps instead of our internal compass.

We research people instead of getting a gut feel.

And we demand empirical evidence, often ignoring how easy it is to manipulate that evidence to say what we want.

The result is that we don't trust - or even notice - our intuition anymore, causing us to waste one of our two great skills, forgetting that they work best together.

We are an animal built to analyze and intuit.

And wandering is a practice that brings your intuition back to life.

Do not hide in the black and white.

Go wander.