What is Wandering?
Beyond the Bumper Stickers
Wandering is using intuition to move through territory.
What is intuition, you ask? We'll come back to it.
But the territory you're moving through, that could be a forest, a city, a library, or a book. It could be real, or virtual.
Wandering is often described as movement without purpose, but the wanderer usually has many goals, and they trust their intuition to (usually) bring them to a higher quality outcome than following a direct path.
(Should a need become acute, the wanderer can always switch to a more focused method.)
The wanderer understands that we humans don't know what we don't know, which is often life or death stuff, and that it is only revealed by wandering off the edges of our own map.
Imagine you are on your way to work.
You are trying to get from A to B. You use your accumulated experience (intuition) to pick the right lane and avoid pockets of congestion, but you have a clear goal and a critical path and it takes A LOT to push you off of it.
This is commuting.
Now imagine you are curious about butterflies.
You go to the library, pull several books, and flip through the pages at random, letting your attention alight upon wherever it is drawn. You are letting intuition lead your inquiry, and it is very easy to pull you off course.
This is wandering. You're trusting... something... to bring you to what you need to know to build a bigger, badder knowledge map about butterflies (and their connections to everything else).
But what is that something that you're trusting? What is intuition?
That's the alchemical question. Asking this is what turns simply walking around into something magic.
Dan Flag
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