“I glance at my watch to sense the time; I glance at my Blackberry to get a sense of my life.”*

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”**

We wonder what can be accomplished if we stay connected and available.  This is our tethered world.  It’s efficient but not particularly effective in what matters most.  Effectiveness required presence.  Multi-tasking is another way of saying we’re not doing anything particularly well.

When we’re able to focus our minds and hearts and bodies then we not only see, we feel and find our minds working in unusual ways.  No computer necessary – and new things appear.

‘Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist.  They live in mechanical time.’^

With no smartphone in sight, wanderer “R” notices someone she thinks she recognises, a little later she notices him again as he walks in the opposite direction.  She walks to where the man has returned from, noticing a box tied to a tree with pamphlets in it, she takes a copy.  It’s The Perigrinator, a publication of the Wander Society containing a number of strange articles for how to wander.  Touching on something as mysterious as this and yet timely for the age we live in, she expresses:

“I hugged the paper to my chest and felt myself wanting to run excitedly down the street.”^^

Perhaps here is a picture of a life, untethered from an ineffective continual copresence in which we try to remain connected in many directions at all times.

‘Let us allow our wild spirits to roam unfettered and unbound.’*^

(*A university student, quoted in Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together.)
(**Physician Albert Szentgyorgyi, quoted by Rohit Bhargava in NonObvious.)
(^From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(^^Wanderer “R,” quoted in Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.  She comes to the realisation the man she had seen and recognised could have been Nick Papadimitriou, also known as the London erambulator.)
(*^From Keri Smith’s The Wander Society.)