On Wandering
Guest Post by All You Need Contributor Nate Damm
I’ve spent the last year on the road. I took a long hiking trip, which took up a good part of the year, and have been moving around since that was completed. The longest I’ve been in a place is six weeks. Prior to this year, however, my travel experience was pretty much zero.
Even though I’m still a relatively inexperienced traveler, it didn’t take me long to fall in love with the lifestyle. But the intense joy/frustration that a wandering lifestyle brings has continually perplexed me.
Why do I feel a compulsion to keep going? Why does travel affect some people so deeply, and others are fine with just a week of vacation each year? I put the ability to move as I please over everything; family, romantic relationships, friends, and really any sort of comfort and stability. The only thing set in stone is that there is nothing set in stone. And when things to get a bit more long-term, like the two times I’ve stayed in one place (for the most part) for six weeks, I cherish the thought that at any time I can grab my small backpack of things and be on my way in a matter of minutes if I choose to do so.
I had pages of notes scribbled down with thoughts on this concept that confused and excited me so much, yet was making virtually no progress on making any sense of it. I first thought that the impulse to move lied in the seeking of adventure with some sort of drive to find the next adrenaline rush. But I quickly realized that couldn’t be it. I prefer to move slowly, which is actually quite boring sometimes. I’m certainly no adrenaline or adventure junkie.
Sitting on a sidewalk bench in a small town and watching people go about their daily lives is much more interesting to me than skydiving or any other common adrenaline boosting activity. I was stuck. Happy, but confused.
That is, until a chance encounter with a largely forgotten book made everything clear. While out for a long walk with a group of friends one day, one of them pulled an old, thin book from his backpack and read a passage from it. The book was Wandering by Hermann Hesse. I would later read through it and find the answer to what I had been trying to figure out.
In a chapter entitled, “Small Town,” Hesse remembered a beautiful woman from his past, which launched him into a train of thought on love and wandering. He wrote:
“I belong to those windy voices, who don’t love women, who love only love. All of us wanderers are made like this. A good part of our wandering and homelessness is love, eroticism. The romanticism of wandering, at least half of it, is nothing else but a kind of eagerness for adventure. But the other half is another eagerness — an unconscious drive to transfigure and dissolve the erotic. We wanderers are very cunning — we develop those feelings which are impossible to fulfill; and the love which actually should belong to a woman, we lightly scatter among small towns and mountains, lakes and valleys, children by the side of the road, beggars on the bridge, cows in the pasture, birds and butterflies. We separate love from its object, love alone is enough for us, in the same way that, in wandering, we don’t look for a goal, we only look for the happiness of wandering, only the wandering.“
Love relates to wanderlust? Seriously?
After several days of thought on the matter, I realized that Hesse was right. My pages of notes stopped mattering, and I stopped adding to them. I knew what I should have realized on my own much earlier.
Not to sound all sappy, but love truly is at the root of everything. It goes beyond the romantic love stories we’re conditioned to believe after years of watching TV shows and movies. We’re blinded by our “love story” obsessed society.
Real love finds its way into the most minuscule cracks of existence, silently inspiring us to do the things we do. It isn’t the kind of thing that is directed only one way and confined to boundaries. This can make it hard to identify.
It’s more like a net cast out over everything we do and say.
According to Hesse, a wanderer scatters their love “among small towns and mountains, lakes and valleys, children by the side of the road, beggars on the bridge, cows in the pasture, birds and butterflies.” The bring it, and leave it everywhere they go. I think he was trying to say that sometimes love is all that is there pushing us forward. It drives everything. It is always there, and it is always enough. Always.
He writes, “We separate love from its object,” and maybe that’s the only way to really see it.
Although Hesse relates this notion to the traveler, it works in any walk of life.
A lot of people are obsessed with love, but struggle when they can’t seem to find any measure of it that feels real and tangible. It’s because that way of thinking isn’t realistic. Many of us seek something in vain that is already there. It’s right in front of us to see every day if we just stop and take a look around.
All You Need Contributor: Nate Damm
Nate Damm lives in Maine at the moment. He reads a lot, builds things and is currently writing a book about his walk across the United States. You can follow him at his blog, NateDamm.com or on Twitter @whereisnate.
Song: Guaranteed by Eddie Vedder
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