Monday, December 12, 2011

On Wandering

I'm leaving Paris on Friday, and I have a lot of feelings about that. But for now, I want to talk about wandering.

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, "Not all those who wander are lost." Well, J.R.R., I think your books need a really overzealous editor, because no one wants to read a description of a forest for 15 pages, and I think you get too much credit for that quote.

No all those who wander are lost? No shit, Sherlock. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that if you're wandering, you're not lost. Just awesome. You know what people do when they're lost? They cry. The pull out maps. They frantically ask for directions.

Wandering isn't like that. Wandering is poignant and stress-free.

About a week ago, I went to London with my two best France buds, Faith and Erin. We didn't have a whole lot of plans, because we're too cool for that. And we ended up just doing a lot of...well, wandering. It's funny, because if you ask us what we did that weekend, we just kind of shrug. What did we do that weekend? We walked past Buckingham Palace. We climbed some lions. We saw Wicked. We ate Indian food. But there are so many hours in the day, so much time that more driven tourists could have filled with museums and guided tours and whatnot.

Did I mention we climbed a lion?

But we just wandered. We wandered past some restaurants. We wandered around a department store. And we wandered down a long long long street, where we were expecting to find a tube station.

There was no tube station on that street.

Nope.
So I guess you could say we were lost. We didn't look at our maps, so I'm not sure if it counts as lost, just guessing that there will be a tube stop and not finding one. But we were looking for something and it wasn't there. But you know what we did find on that street? We found some piles of leaves to frolic merrily in. We found a statue with confusing dates on it. We found a free museum with the most fascinating exhibit on craftsmanship. And we didn't mind one jot that we were "lost."

Merrily frolicking!
So I guess what I'm saying, is that "wandering" is just a state of mind. And so is "lost." But I would say that the best way to explore a new place is not by making a great big schedule with all the things you want to do and see, and then getting "lost" trying to find them, but by setting out to wander, maybe in the general direction of something cool, maybe not.

All things considered, London was the best.

The. Best.

3 comments:

  1. Beautiful, my deeply adorable child.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The best way to discover a place is to just wander. I love to wander in a new place. That is how you end up at a wooly mammoth museum in Barcelona chatting with some scientist from the Ukraine. That is how you end up on a bus in the Alps without knowing where it will end and getting off in a dream location on a lake. The best things all come from wandering. And sometimes you catch a baby rolling down a hill.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Polly, can we be best friends forever?

    ReplyDelete