Wandering and Mindfulness: On the Right to Slow Down

Many of us wish we could travel more than we do but learning how we come to appreciate smaller acts of wandering and mindfulness may be more empowering than we realize.

Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash

“It’s not what you look at that matters,

it’s what you see.”

-Henry David Thoreau

In our post-pandemic age, I find myself fortunate to be working remotely from home with a flexible schedule. However, I have worked many jobs in the past where it never felt like I could ever catch a break. The pressure from the boss was everpresent like the great beaming Eye of Sauron. Despite my current cushy circumstances and no evil eye breathing down my neck anymore, I still need occasional breaks because staring at screens all day flatly hurts my brain and soul. Typically, I’ll take ten minutes to meditate on the back porch or go for a walk with our dog where my mind often wanders off contemplating future far-flung adventures. Better yet I’ll combine my wandering with mindfulness for I’ve always found walking to be the best form of meditation.

Most of us unfortunately do not yet have such privileged work situations that grant us this level of autonomy to slow down during the work week or perhaps we do but are still addled by a workaholic mentality believing work will set us free and just can’t shake the guilt of slowing down for the sake of our mental health. Some of us thrive by going fast after all. Nevertheless, many of us endlessly struggle to slow down throughout our week.

The other day a thought percolated into my head while on one of these pleasant strolls of mine: Has anyone ever proposed a right to slow down? Okay, I know what some may be thinking already, “What’s next, the right to ‘quiet quitting’ and employers having to pay for meditation retreats for their employees? Shut up you whiny millennial and get back to work!”

Given that the list of human rights already hinges on notions of liberty, freedom, and autonomy, the right to slow down is already basically implicit in many human rights. For instance, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one can make the case that Article III (right to life, liberty, and personal security) seems like it already grants one the ability to walk the pace of life one chooses. Article XIII (freedom of movement and place of residency) also gets us close in its commitment to the right to free movement.

So no, I’m not officially launching a political campaign or attempting to schedule a hearing with the United Nations anytime soon. This is simply a rhetorical exercise. In our hectic modern world, we tend to pay a lot of lip service to our ideals of liberty, freedom, and autonomy. Yet, many people also report that they do not feel like they can freely slow down and relax, all the while pridefully stating that we live in a free nation. Here lies yet another instance of cognitive dissonance in our culture. How is it possible that so many of us feel like there isn’t enough time in the day after all our improvements in technology designed to alleviate drudgery and “save time”? I’m thinking of washing machines and dishwashers and transportation technologies that would seem like traveling at light speed for someone living just a few hundred years ago.

We’re constantly feeling the heat to get to work on time, make it to a meeting or class, pick up groceries on the way home, and not forget to pick the kids up from daycare or the grandparents before 5:00. In The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society I covered how, despite the improvements in technology to save us time, we’ve nevertheless kept a social structure, economic system, and culture in place that privileges continuous growth and efficiency,

“Our society places a premium on efficiency. Whether it’s coffee in the morning to get us going, Amazon packages arriving at our door in a single day, or getting to work “on time,” we value expediency a lot in our society. We even now demand this of our information. Until recently, news cycles were not 24/7 but we have rapidly transitioned into an information and knowledge economy that requires constant processing. Efficiency and expediency have obvious benefits, but seldom do we ask whether efficiency is an intrinsic good. What might we be trading off for its sake? Is technology truly liberating us or are there unforeseen restraints being placed on us? And how do we better slow down in our world? Do we even have a choice in the matter?”

In last week’s post, I discussed that we need an implementation of the gap year in the United States to allow our youth to slow down and make better decisions about their future. However, gap years don’t necessarily need to be exclusive to youth. Many of us experience burnout and want— no, deserve— to seek greater meaning and purpose at many stages of our lives. Life is hard and we all eventually reach moments of major transition at various phases of our lives—whether we’re about to have children, find ourselves between jobs, have recently gone through a divorce, or have sadly suffered the loss of a loved one. These are times of great stress and change—if only we had a Monopoly-like “get out of jail free card”, or a “get out of town card”, these are the moments we’d be using that card.

The amount one can take time off varies widely in our society. Some of us are fortunate to be granted months’ worth of PTO and holiday pay. If we’re high up on the academic totem, we’re granted an entire sabbatical year. Many others are left having to eat a loss of income if they need time off because they are sick or need a vacation. Some are oddly even threatened by a loss of employment if they miss a single day flipping hamburgers. We need an upgrade to our culture, one that allows all of us to take time to wander and explore during these critical junctures in our lives without the guilt and financial burden that comes from being off work. These are moments when we should be declaring our right to slow down.

Even more granular, how do we better punctuate our day-to-day lives with pauses and moments of slowing down? The practice of mindfulness has changed my life in this regard. I’ve been practicing mindfulness meditation for more than five years now and one of the core things it has taught me is how to be more deliberate with my time and take a keen interest in what’s around me, rather than always wishing I was somewhere more exciting. Slowing down and appreciating the small details of our world is one of the most remarkable discoveries and enhancements one can make to their life. It is a central component to what I mean in my definition of wandering—appreciating that adventure is all about how you see things rather than what you look at or where you are situated on the globe. Acts of wandering infused with mindfulness allow adventures for anyone, anywhere.

Thus, maybe we don’t always need some far-flung expensive tour around the world to bring us greater contentment in our lives. Many of us wish we could travel more than we do but learning how to appreciate smaller acts of wandering and mindfulness may be more empowering than we first realize. Applying mindfulness to the wanderings that are accessible right out our back door or in our own neighborhoods is what most of us have control over and can do to live a more adventurous and fulfilling life. How do we remain enchanted by the places we’ll spend most of our time? Is it possible that we can see these mundane places we’ve lived in for ten or twenty years with fresh eyes and explore them as if we’re just now visiting them for the first time?

I happened upon this insight years ago and recounted it in my post Traveling Versus Wandering,

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.

In the field of psychology, the term habituation applies to how humans get used to the environment in which we live. We often can easily become bored with the places we live in and quickly gain the sense that there is just “nothing to do” in our small towns. But the practice of mindfulness hacks this habituation in a very sharp way by showing us that there is an infinite universe that surrounds us wherever we are. We can take sincere pleasure in the most seemingly mundane things in our immediate environment.

As I’ve argued before, adventure is more of a mindset and many of us might be surprised how radical our perspective on life might shift if we embraced this notion of wandering infused with mindfulness,

“All one needs is the imagination and willingness to keep pushing themselves into unknown and yet-to-be-experienced realms of life. Adventures need not be elaborate or exotic, distant or remote, life-threatening, or foolhardy. Neither are adventures necessarily something solely entitled to the extreme risk-takers of the world or the well-to-do elites. They can simply be in the backyard, your hometown, the next county over, a neighboring state, or virtually anywhere that changes our perception of something.”

Whether you’ve been stressed out from work this week or sailed through it swimmingly but still feeling oddly unfulfilled, I encourage you to begin experimenting with this act of slowing down and how to build it into your week. Spend a couple of days this week just going for a walk somewhere new and close to home. Walk down a road you’ve never been down and study the experience. Pay close attention to all the houses and people you cross paths with. Try your best to not worry about anything that has been bothering you. For just these moments, forget about the past, forget about the future. Take deep breaths and do your best to simply study the present moment. Challenge yourself by applying mindfulness to your wandering and claim your right to slow down.

Have a great weekend!

For consideration:

●      What kinds of small acts or weekly wanderings do you already do to help you slow down throughout your week?

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Cheers!

-JSB