What Is ‘Aimless Wandering’?
Aimless wandering is a Daoist walking meditation practice which is intended to rejuvenate the mind by recapturing one’s childlike wonder towards nature for a short time (or a long time!).
The method is simply to find a place of natural beauty and wander along wherever your instincts take you without thinking about it very much as a child might do before the obstructions of adulthood get in the way.
Aimless wandering is a form of mindfulness meditation, albeit not a strict one as we find in Zen walking meditation. The way in which mindfulness is practiced in this Daoist exercise is simply to amble about without deliberately giving any thought to the past or the future, nor berating oneself if you do slip into this habitual way of thinking. As you wander along simply appreciate the sights, sounds & smells of nature and allow yourself to enjoy them as you may have done as a child.
The enjoyment of nature in the present moment is important because most of us are stuck in a mental trap of either feeling regret or feeling nostalgic for past events and also fearing or looking forward to future events. Of course we do need this mindset to function in day to day life but we frequently waste the precious present moment by obsessing about the past and future all of the time without ceasing.
Aimless wandering is therefore beneficial because it releases us from the ever present cage of agendas, calendars, appointments, concerns, schedules and goals that relentlessly dominate our minds to such an extent that we forget how we ever functioned without them. Unstructured periods of “adult play time” time help us to balance our lives in a healthy way that compensates for the time we spend burdened by our jobs and other requirements, a practice that is all the more relevant in our hectic contemporary environment.
(I have found that the benefits of aimless wandering can also be found by practicing in an urban environment, wandering around between old bookstores and quirky coffee shops if you can’t get out into nature.)
