A path from A to B, planned, scheduled and typically known. That’s the way I navigated through most of my life.
I’m old enough to remember navigating before we had those handy little devices telling us exactly where to turn. Back then we had the foldable kind of navigation that you kept stuffed in the glovebox and could never quite get folded back the way it came. I usually knew where I was going. I’d look at the map, figure out the route and get there.
But sometimes, just for fun, I’d keep driving. I’d go past the road I normally turned on or continue beyond the part of town I knew, just to see what was there. There wasn’t really a destination. Eventually I’d have to figure out where the hell I was and how to get home, but that was part of the fun.
I hadn’t really thought about that in years.
It’s funny because somewhere along the way I became much more interested in destinations. GPS probably helped with that. Now I can type in exactly where I want to go and my phone will tell me the fastest way to get there, how long it’s going to take, where the traffic is and approximately how many minutes of my life I’ll lose if I make the wrong turn. It’s very efficient. Also, sometimes, kind of boring.
The other day, my girl and I spent about four hours driving roads I’d never been on before. I wasn’t completely lost, and we weren’t exactly aimless, but getting somewhere wasn’t really the point. We were driving to see what was there.
Turns out there were logs in the road, a roadside bakery, some really good cinnamon rolls, a ridiculous number of chipmunks and some beautiful scenery. Had we been trying to get somewhere as efficiently as possible, most of that would have been completely useless, which is probably why I enjoyed it so much.
I’ve written before about Spontaneity and my efforts to occasionally loosen my grip on the plan. Wandering feels a little different. I’ve spent much of my life associating direction with responsibility. Career, marriage, raising kids, providing, schedules, work, plans. Knowing where I was going was useful. Wandering doesn’t mean I don’t have a direction. Sometimes it just means I’m willing to take a road that wasn’t part of the original route.
Of course, GPS has made truly wandering more difficult. Even when I don’t know where I am, the little blue dot does. Apparently I’ve outsourced getting lost.
Geocaching might be my most technologically advanced form of wandering. I use several billion dollars’ worth of satellites to go someplace I had absolutely no reason to visit so I can look under a log for a plastic container. Yet somehow this makes perfect sense to me.
Photography gives me another kind of wandering. Sometimes going somewhere without a shot list and simply looking is how I find something worth photographing. I don’t always have to know what I’m looking for before I start looking.
I’m starting to realize I’ve been wandering in other ways too. I’ve tried things simply because they interested me. I’ve revisited things I’d forgotten I enjoyed. I’ve spent time figuring out what I actually want instead of immediately asking what I’m supposed to do next. Maybe that’s part of the Curiosity I’ve been rediscovering lately.
Some of those roads haven’t gone anywhere, and that’s okay. They were still worth driving. Not everything I try has to become a hobby, a business, a goal or another damn project. Sometimes finding out that I don’t want something is every bit as useful as discovering that I do.
Even in my relationship, I’m learning that having a direction doesn’t mean I need a detailed itinerary. We’re building something together. We’re learning each other, creating our own routines, having adventures and occasionally driving down roads simply because neither of us has been there before.
I know who I want beside me. I don’t need to know every turn we’re going to make.
I still like knowing where I’m going. That’s probably not going away. I’ll still make plans, check the route and probably have a backup route because apparently that’s who I am.
But every once in a while, I want to keep driving past the familiar turn. Not because I’m lost, but because I haven’t seen what’s down that road yet.
And maybe I don’t always need a destination to have a reason to go.