aimless wander
I miss walking everywhere. Where I live, daily commutes are performed exclusively in isolation: grey rumbling machines that hop through traffic like salmon, avoiding the jutting steel and three-second promontories created by the stop of a public bus or the yellow arms akimbo of rear hazard lights. To go far in my city traveling exclusively on foot is not only inefficient, it is nearly impossible — many streets lack the bare-minimum infrastructure of sidewalks and pavements, dedicated crosswalks that get you from place to place.
When I travel to other locations, I often find two things in particular: one, I can actually walk to a destination, and two, it always feels like it's winter, even when it's not. I lust for the chill, the shock of the icy air upon unprotected skin as I meander my way down from my couch-surfed apartment with cadenced notes upon concrete stairs, a song colliding with the metal door, first with hands — not enough force — then with full shoulder into the pushbar as it forcefully swings open into the morning.
I look around the street. Sometimes my direct surroundings are brick, broken but saturated with character through years of bitter wear, makeshift cave paintings splattered in crude blues and yellows and greens; but my streetview this morning happens to be tall glass, smoothed over in efficient timeboxes of construction where descending from the towering, urban stalagmites jutting from the asphalt are bright-eyed new grad workers clad in their collared shirts or company logo-ed fleece hoodies.
However, the individuals who comprise the area upon the street matter little to me: it is the street itself that is my monastery, the spiritual, trance-like effect of goosebumps upon my flesh and hair tossed, whipped into disarray by ferocious gusts, the pressing agentic electricity furiously welling in me, what a basic, but powerful feeling to know that I can go anywhere with the most ancient form of locomotion.
For people who grew up in navigable carousels filled with options for transport and painted lines, these observations are likely a given, the most essential aspects of everyday reality where you tap or hop a turnstile, or press foot into chain into wheel to get to a location within ten minutes. I had no such luxury. Until I turned 17 my days of walking to places were relegated solely to being picked-up and dropped-off with a single, typically unavailable, silver sedan. The nearest ‘walkable’ point of interest being twenty-five minutes by car implies that the majority of my time was spent inside the same room, drinking in pictures and sounds secondhand through a media screen or the turn of a wrinkled page, rather than experiencing the world through steps, fully present, myself. Some days I wonder how much I have missed by discovering my early life in that way, what details went unseen?
The idea of a flâneur has been on my mind — French meaning a person who strolls, idles, lounges. Pulling straight from the online encyclopedia: "an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life."
Clearly being such a person is an unsustainable state (at least at the moment), but still I find it aspirational to have an eagerness to linger and stop on a whim, to let transient impulse carry decisions.
Pause, observe.
I'm ambling through the morning that is rapidly picking up warmth. There is a residual scent of smoke wafting through the sky, a distant northwest forest flame that has metastasized, spewing fountains of white-grey-black that I can see stored in the shimmering reflections upon enormous glass columns of tech giants, intertwining with the dusk-laden King Krule track blaring in my right ear. The hazy backdrop leaves a center stage that I recover my sight to, and suddenly there are stalls arranged along a barricaded road, tented crowds forming among Honeycrisp apples and cuts of meat. In the swarm I've lost, and then found again, my friends who I entered alongside: M is laughing with a girl handing her a bottle of tea, I cross paths with H, who is now gently clutching one of the aforementioned apples. We reconvene with W minutes later, and leave the market to wander some more.
Passing an unknown number of blocks we come to a stop at a nautical-themed coffee shop. I note that this city in particular seems to be remarkably aggressive in their craft and consumption of caffeine so the drinks we ordered are, as was expected, a rich, perfected warmth. We sit with paper cups at a table hugging the street, which compared to our City of Angels home is strikingly tranquil, fall leaves crunching underfoot and light chatter echoing through the orange trees. Somewhere between the darkened café and the ferry pier where we spied the reunion of two lovers on bikes, H mentions that she finds it funny how moments like these are ensconced in a shiny bubble separate from the linear, routine timeline of our lives, I nod, and a thought sweeps behind my eyes recognizing that yes, I can feel happy, this is happy now.
The paradigmatic site of modern urban experience is carefully held in the random stroll. The seemingly useless experiences as you pace about (I say this as a personal reassurance) must amount to something. Baudelaire, Kerouac, and all the others with a feverish curiosity for city streets and back alleys, frayed around the edges and sleep-deprived have made a discovery, a revelation I've missed my entire life: the restless meditative calm that comes with placing one foot in front of the other.
I'm writing this hours out of the airport, how amusing that ambivalence and spontaneity have become great, dear friends to me, great friends who pester me with questions: I've been working so hard to become adept at managing my life, but what if I find out that what I really wanted was a life that doesn't need to be managed? To what extent is rigidity my undoing?
To sail a tumultuous sea of novelty with friends or alone, the contentment of absenting one's self from the routine, purity of aimless wander and the uncatchable trail. I love the freedom of empty hands and open time. I don't know what this is all for, but it feels good, so I keep going.