Wandering might be what defines us. We developed these crazy tongues and big big brains to map territory across time and space, and communicate with each other about it.
We even have an enlarged hippocampus to help us catalogue, store, and interpret spatial information.
As we explored the world, we got smarter. In some ways we got more sensitive, in other ways, less.
But as we kept exploring this spinning rock, we began to have a sense of how all the systems fit together. Or maybe that part is yet to come. But we understood more and more and more about cause and effect, and we built systems to buffer ourselves from the effects of our actions.
We drilled into the surface of the earth, and burned what we found and it gave us super powers and we forgot what we are.
Prometheus at Rockefeller Center, stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity.
We are evolutionarily specialized to use reason & intuition in tandem to expand our map of reality and make better & better decisions. It's our top survival strategy.
The problem is that in modern times, intuition is suppressed. Our buffers have driven us mad.
But by showing us things we don't know that we don't know, wandering brings intuition back.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” - Mark Twain
