I love to drive.

I think nothing of driving six hours each way for a weekend jaunt, or 22 hours round-trip to spend a few days with family three states away. My last “long” excursion was a six-month, 13-state trip in the Intermountain West that covered more than 30,000 miles. When I got back, I was itching to get on the road again.

I travel solo for the most part, and with the exception of occasional podcasts on particularly uninspiring and familiar stretches, I am undistracted. It’s just me, the sound of the engine and the road, and the ever-unfolding vistas that roll past my window.

For me, these journeys are deeply spiritual; lengthy indulgences in nomadic meditation and solitary connection with the environment. I am at once a tiny speck in the landscape and part of an impossibly enormous world.

Wandering always predisposes me to introspection. Sometimes, when there is a perfect, mysterious convergence of muse and mindfulness, I am propelled into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described as “flow”: a state of effortless, complete immersion and deep satisfaction in the moment at hand.¹

But why?

Many times I have wondered what it is about wandering that drives me (puns obviously intended) to to explore, mostly without an explicit destination.

I think it is the experience of freedom that keeps me rolling, year after year and decade after decade. For the duration of the odyssey, I am the proverbial captain of my own destiny, free to explore whatever highways, roads and trails may catch my eye and capture my imagination.

My friends who fly to any place more than a hundred miles away see these sublime paths as distant artifacts in the atmospheric haze, if they see them at all. I understand the time savings that result from air travel, but wonder what they plan to do with the time thay have “saved.” There aren’t many uses of time more profound than a connection with the Earth upon which we all live and die.

Many times I have aimed my four-wheel-drive truck up a marginally-maintained road and then, when the road ends, I hike to the top of a ridge or hill that would remain unseen by those who focus only on paved civilization.

At the crest of the hike, my wife – who sometimes accompanies me – frequently says, “We may be the only people who have ever walked here.” In that sentence lies the answer to “why.”

We desert-dwellers, mountain men, prairie pioneers and swamp runners are magnificent in our propensity to explore, to go “…where no man has gone before…”² Without the innate restlessness that prods us into wondering “…where does that highway go?”³ humankind would still be massed around the places of its origin.

Time spent on the road is time well spent: Not all who wander are lost.⁴

1. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper and Row.
2. Samuel A. Peoples wrote the third episode of the same name in the initial season of Star Trek (the original). If I could ask him, I suspect he might describe the same feeling that I write about here.
3. As David Byrne famously sang in Once in a Lifetime, by Talking Heads (1980).
4. J.R.R. Tolkien (speaking as Gandalf) in The Lord of the Rings.

As always, I welcome your thoughts. You can reach me through the comments section on my Substack or Medium accounts or the blog section on my website. If this article as of value to you, please follow my Instagram and Twitter accounts. And be sure to subscribe to my River Of Creation podcast – The Podcast for Creators! – coming later this year.

Be well; do good!

• JWW