As of two o’clock in the afternoon I have logged nearly seventeen thousand steps. Walking. Wandering. Vaguely destinationed towards places where I could sit and write after walking and reading and trying not to trip and fall flat on my face.
I’ll be the first to admit that I had no real plan about what to write in this blog. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe. But too, correlating with that lack of a plan came a lack of a name. Anything I have written in the last decade or so has pretty much started with a clever name after which the words on the corresponding topic seemed to flow with clarity and abandon. I had no real plan this time, though, and so when the blogging software asked me to type in, dammit, something, anything, what are you calling this blog, man? I typed in something about “wandering” and off I went to post.
This struck me as an adequate title, at least to start. Why? Well, obviously because as it stands I seem to be doing a lot of wandering lately. Literally and figuratively. Wandering through life. Wandering through my career. Wandering the trails. Wandering up and down and back and forth and wherever the trail seems to be taking me.
So that the first few of my posts have been about wandering and walking is, perhaps, no surprise.
And so that I spent my latest day off walking until my feet hurt was, perhaps, also not much of a surprise.
This may turn into a blog about wandering after all.
As of two o’clock then I have wandered at least ten kilometers through the trails and streets and neighbourhoods, and though I have found myself having not gone very far nor accomplishing very much, I have logged some serious wandering steps to that specific nowhere in particular.
I have been inclined to write for as long as I can remember. I would even suggest that there has never been a conscious moment in my life when I have not felt that my purpose—my raison d’etre as it were—as a sentient human being wandering around with my senses alert and recording was not also part of some grand universal plan to turn those thoughts and observations into words on a page.
Sounds like an ego thing.
If that sounds egotistical, it should not.
I usually struggle to find any other equally driving force behind my own existence, as if my fingers are simply the equivalent of whatever constitutes the USB port of the universe and my role is to turn everything I see, think, and hear into data output. It’s a silly idea, but rationally it’s not a terrible thing to have a role that one can articulate—even a role as silly as being a data port on a computer analogy. I wander and I write and then I wander some more and I write some more. Click save…aaaaaand writing to disk.
So here I am, writing some more.
Writing about writing. Writing about wandering and then writing about wandering and then writing more about the irreducible loop I find myself in writing such things before I go out and wander and write and wander and write some more.
I have been trying to write an introduction to this blog. I don’t attempt to do that because I expect some grand audience to dive into these words and make sense of them, or to make sense of me, but rather to try to formalize this role I have taken upon myself: recorder of things, stenographer to the universe, guy with a keyboard and a website. This is important shit, after all. These are big shoes to fill. If I don’t know what I’m doing here, what’s the point. I gotta make sense of it if no one else but for myself.
As of two o’clock in the afternoon I had logged a helluva lot of wandering steps and typed a few hundreds of words and landed in a cafe where I could sit and channel all that data into a keyboard. And out the metaphorical data port comes this: a purpose and maybe the best explanation that I can muster. These are works of wandering the world and wherever, opening my eyes to the universe and logging it into yet another website.
You want a reason for something or anything at all? I write because it is who I am, and I can’t explain why else.
