No shortcuts, but lots of deviations
When I made my second zine I included a little bit of text. The zine was a collection of photographs from Kosciusko National Park, a place I really enjoyed exploring while I lived in Canberra. This relatively small part of Australia has some of our most mountainous terrain and snow and because of this felt both really unique and very adventurous.
In the text I wrote about how walking and hiking are activities that you can't hack or shortcut. There's only one thing to do: put one foot in front of the other. In that repetition and simplicity, free of efficiencies, measurements and evaluation, creativity and the mind completely open up.
I find, still, walking around brings for me so many ideas, so much life and a ton of appreciation. Recently I've had to be re-assessing a lot of my habits and I was recently asked 'do you notice things visually that others may miss?'. While it's a tough question to ask, I think the answer is 'yes, but maybe just because I'm often out walking around looking and being delighted'. I like to know the trees, the good places to see sunset, the spiders' webs, where the bats are, the most interesting flowers, the weirdest houses, the constructions that are being undertaken, the quiet parts of the river, the desire paths that lead somewhere special.
Walking, exploring, finding things that are really wonderful is a really pure expression of what I think life is really about: to be open to letting life unfold in unexpected ways.
I've written previously about how I sort of find tracking, quantifying and measuring things quite boring and pointless. To me it robs the joy and expansiveness from a lot of every day activities. I'm not pursuing, say, a kilometer or step goal, but rather a feeling of openness, freedom and appreciation.
Similarly, I don't really have things that many of my friends and peers do in terms of ambitions. For a long time I just picked the most interesting thing and did that. Whether it was moving around, following a girl, traveling to a place I knew nothing about, or saying yes to going fishing, generally if it would at least leave me with a story I'd be in. I've had strangers drive me around local haunts, had truck drivers in China swap a lift for a selfie, hunted pheasants and been shown around the backblocks of Japan by students. I like being somewhere, without a map or a plan, and just seeing what will happen
Like walking, I think that there are no shortcuts to this. A shortcut is a faster way between two points, but if there's no second point, how can you get there faster?
It's difficult to advocate for this sometimes. A lot of my friends and colleagues live in environments that explicitly demand results, speed, accuracy and data. There's certainly nothing wrong with those things, but it is hard sometimes to say 'have you tried not having a plan, and just trusting that something interesting will happen?'. In a lot of ways that sounds like a bit of a second best. But, to me at least, it isn't. There's nothing better than surprise and being rewarded by letting the world unfold and show itself to you.
So whether you see a really cool birds' nest, find a quiet bend in the river you never noticed before, have a really lovely chat with a person at a shop, or end up making friends with someone at a hostel I hope that you, like me, get the particular joys of unstructured, unplanned, completely welcomed delight that await us when we stop trying so hard, let go a little and let things take their course, especially when out walking.