[From the Archives] Traveling Versus Wandering
What’s the Difference and Why Does it Matter?
Greetings fellow wanderers,
Today I am republishing another post from the archives. As Those Who Wander has surpassed 700 subscribers, I am grappling with the fact that most new subscribers may not have access to or be familiar with some of my initial writings. With 100 posts in the archive, I want to expose these paywalled posts to newcomers.
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Now onto today’s archived post, Traveling Versus Wandering?
“It’s all about the journey, not the destination.”
-The wanderer’s mantra.
Every person who has traveled has likely asked this question and probably debated it with their fellow travelers, “What does it mean to travel to or visit a place?” What “counts” as visiting another country or a state in the United States? Most would say that bouncing from one airport to another, say from JFK to Heathrow to Florence, Italy would not qualify you as technically traveling to or visiting London, much less England. You were technically on British soil for a few hours, but sitting in the airport eating some fish and chips doesn’t exactly count as a new cultural experience in anyone’s book.
However, does spending two weeks traveling via trains and taxis up and down Italy’s western coast visiting a handful of towns and cities allow you to now say you’ve been to Italy? Well not all of Italy, of course. For convenience’s sake, we might say we’ve visited Italy, but deep down we know it isn’t entirely accurate either. For what would visiting “all of Italy” even look like? Can we ever gain the true sense or essence of a single country, much less the world?
Why do we think this way about countries to begin with—as something that can be known, conquered, or collected? The answer probably has something to do with how we’ve learned to view the world. Staring at maps as we grow up, we impress borders into our minds, but truth be told, those geopolitical borders are not there—they are symbols of our desire to categorize and control our environment. We’ve created them over time as an attempt to conveniently manage things like human movement, prevent terrorism and illegal movement of goods and people, and quell humanity’s longest-running motive for conflict, territorial disputes.
Although it is challenging to do so, when we come to see the world as a single geographical landmass devoid of artificial borderlines, we come to think of travel a little differently.
So, how much of a place needs to be experienced until we can confidently say we’ve been somewhere? Is it hitting all the popular attractions, museums, art galleries, restaurants, hot springs, parks, and all other pleasantries a given city has to offer? Do we need to sip an espresso beneath the Duomo in Florence, before we’ve fully gotten to the depth of a place? What would it mean to know a place like Paris, France, intimately? Do we have to technically live there are entire lives? Would that be enough? And what is the best method of visiting a place?
What is wandering, and how is it different than traveling?
As I wrote in a previous post, our perceptions of travel have changed rather radically in recent times, and we tend to associate travel with modes of transportation. Traveling is often nowadays about getting somewhere, from point A to point B, and using some medium of transportation, from walking, horseback, or bicycle to planes, trains, or an automobile. By contrast, wandering is a study in phenomenology much akin to the concept of the flâneur and concerned with the pursuit of understanding the meaning and significance of our experience while traveling. Wandering is about being in a place, observing one’s conscious experience, and momentarily setting aside our tendencies to always be thinking of something in the past or of future concerns. In other words, one is attempting to “take it all in” and ground oneself in the present. One could argue that wandering aligns with the meditation practice of mindfulness, beckoning us to step back and observe the world at hand as we indulge in visiting new places.
The wanderer’s mantra, “It’s all about the journey, not the destination,” best encapsulates the distinction between traveling and wandering. The traveler tends to focus all their energy on getting to their destinations—from airport to hotel to restaurant to attraction and back again. The wanderer, on the other hand, is concerned more with the in-between aspects of a journey.
As I argue in my forthcoming book, wandering is a specific type of experience, one we rarely get to engage in because of how modern society has developed and operates—a way of life that is incredibly fast-paced and demanding of our time and attention. Because we can access constant information about our world, be it a map, a GPS, and endless images and descriptions of any place on the globe, we are rarely capable of experiencing what it is like to not know what is beyond our horizon.
In other words, our society and culture often impose mental models on us subconsciously, and we therefore rarely have our own opportunities to see and construct the world for ourselves. Like watching a film and then reading the book based on the film, we cannot help but see things through the lens of the film we’ve already seen and ingrained in our minds. No matter how hard you try, you cannot help but see Frodo Baggins as Elijah Wood while reading The Lord of the Rings after seeing the film. Likewise, it is difficult to engage with our world without some prior knowledge of what we can expect of a place.
Why does this matter?
Have you ever been on a trip somewhere and felt rushed or compelled to move on to the next thing because the itinerary or someone in the group demanded it? That there just wasn’t enough time for how you preferred to visit and interact with a place? That you never really got to “take it all in?”
Planning for any trip is a wise thing to do, but planning too much can easily become oppressive. Our itineraries can become like straitjackets with little freedom to move about as we please. We bog down the thrill of being somewhere new by obsessing over things like the cost of bus fares, plane tickets, car rentals, and hotel accommodations, weighing the restaurant options, and placing endless reservations here and there. What beach or monument, or historical place, will we want to check out, and for how long do we want to take the tour? Do we have time for just the one-hour tour before dinner at seven? We rush to a place to snap a few quick selfies to document for our various social media accounts to show we were present, then quickly rush to the next hotspot to repeat the whole process as if we’re in some frantic race to collect badges of all the places we’ve been.
Traveling this way lets go of all sense of spontaneity, uncertainty, and serendipity, which are important parts of what adventure is all about. Rather than simply packing up a few reasonable essentials, booking the flight, and letting our tale unfold, many of us appear determined to systematically attempt to plan every detail out in a work-schedule fashion. By the end, the mystery and suspense of the experience are all predetermined. We know almost exactly where we will be and when, what things to expect, for how long we can enjoy our time, and what we’ll be wearing to dinner each evening. The experience is completely predictable, and little to no time is set aside to simply explore and wander and let ourselves become lost and enchanted by the unexpected.
Many of us are not aware of how peculiar and neurotic this behavior of traveling is. But to an anthropologist, this is amusing and calls out to be explained. What’s more, is that we often find ourselves upset or anxious when things don’t go according to our militant plans. We try our hardest to control every detail, rather than letting ourselves adapt to the nuances of our experience. Instead of letting the experience mold and shape us, we try to mold and shape the experience.
Surely, there is little to be learned and appreciated in such an OCD-style of traveling. Of course, some planning is vital. For instance, when the time is constrained, such as in a week-long vacation, then obviously some planning is paramount if we want to get the most out of a limited time frame. But we shouldn’t let this be how our entire lives always run, especially during a thrilling adventure. We need to occasionally set aside some time to explore, wander, and live in the moment.
This overall way of experiencing our travels and life can feel anxiety-ridden and depressing, and it is a symptom of the kind of society and culture we inhabit and come to embody. It’s the very fact that we’ve allowed our time to be constrained by modernity’s high standards, expectations, demands, and fears: the overwhelming commitments, responsibilities, and anxieties we’ve become absorbed by; insurmountable debt, bills, rent, mortgages, schooling, jobs, house chores, another appliance to replace or add, car maintenance and repairs, pets, children, tomorrow’s impending storm, terrorist threats, and all the relentless political noise circulating 24/7. At some point, we must learn to unconstrain ourselves, to downshift a bit, and to let go of some of our worries by consciously minimizing and decluttering our lives so that we may once again learn the art and peace of wandering.
How do we learn to wander?
In my experience, you can get closest to wandering when you solo travel and have a minimally set schedule or itinerary. I reflected on solo travel and its significance in a previous post, but you don’t necessarily need to take a 3,000-mile road trip or travel to some remote or exotic location to experience wandering. The beauty of wandering is that it can simply be cultivated right where you are. It is easiest to study this phenomenon on your own, but once you learn this skill, it can be applied in other contexts regardless of how many other people are around.
When I was a teenager, I once spent the entire day walking aimlessly in cheap sandals from my home into town. Tramping the railroad tracks, I followed the river, down back streets, into an old bookstore, and back up the highway, which ended up totaling some 16 miles at the day’s end. It was the farthest I’d ever walked, and it never occurred to me that I could walk so far in a single day. All I did was let the world pull me along and follow what grabbed my attention. It was all on a whim and I couldn’t explain why I did it, but the day ended up being incredibly fulfilling though my feet were utterly crippled afterward. I saw a boring town I’d driven through hundreds of times in a completely new way. The experience was quite an epiphany and had a profound impact on me. I ended up doing something like this every chance I got and still never came close to seeing everything there was to see in my relatively unexciting, small rural Indiana town. These experiences made me realize just how vast and arguably infinite our planet is, that we are the arbiters of our adventures, and that learning to wander is a far more exciting way to engage with just about any place you may find yourself.
The art of wandering begins by waking up in the morning and asking, “What's something new I could do and learn today? Where haven’t I been before? How much power do I possess to get there? Can I make it happen?” We too easily let ourselves get constrained and trapped in the mire of routine and complacency. We invent excuses to justify our inaction or procrastination. None of us is immune to this. Like being gradually constricted by a snake, we casually allow mounting responsibilities to encroach on our impulses to venture and, before we know it, our “life is flying by.” This could prove potentially fatal to our creativity and sense of self-discovery.
Our perception of time, and hence our lives, seems to rapidly speed up when we repeat yesterday. In psychology, there is a form of learning known as “habituation,” where environmental stimuli we repeatedly encounter without experiencing any positive or negative consequences fade from our attention over time. This explains why morning commutes to work and eventually, entire weeks become nearly indistinguishable from one another. It’s no surprise, then, how 40 years of repeating the same uneventful weeks “fly by” for those of us diligently working nonstop. When things become monotonous and routine, our perception of time condenses. The opposite seems to be the case during an adventure; our perception of time almost seems to expand. As I wrote previously, it is remarkable just how much you can do in a single week when you can momentarily step out of your normal routine and wander on a journey.
How many times have we driven our cars down the same street? After a while, that street has naturally become an unconscious distance without anything noticeably different. If there isn’t a car or building on fire, we’re likely not going to notice much along the street. Now, how many times have we taken a walk or ridden a bike down the very same street? Try this sometime and consciously study the experience. It can be quite startling how different the experience becomes despite covering that same distance numerous times in a vehicle. It can feel like an entirely different road with completely new surroundings. You’ll notice dozens of houses and probably run into people you’d passed hundreds of times that were there all along, but ended up being scrunched together in a speeding haze of detachment. Now think of that in the context of flying across thousands of miles! Thoreau captured this phenomenon by observing,
An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey.
The world miraculously slows down and enhances its resolution when we learn to wander and naturally take in many other features of the landscape.
So when it comes to visiting a place, what “counts” isn’t so much that you simply traveled to x number of countries, but how you engaged with the place and what meaningful experiences you absorbed while there. When it comes to cultivating the art of wandering, remember: Rather than attempt to mold and shape your experience, let the experience mold and shape you.
If you enjoyed this article, consider these related articles from Those Who Wander:
Anatomy of Travel: Staving Off Restlessness Requires a Shift in Perspective, Not Geography
The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society
Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.
Cheers!
-JSB
Justin, as always, I enjoyed reading your post. I have to say, I much prefer exploring new places on my own. Even when visiting places I know well it's more fun to go on my own. I think it makes room for happenstance and I love that.