slowing down

“While most of us are led by the strict demands of timetables and diaries, our soul, the seat of the heart, trails nostalgically behind, burdened by the weight of memory.”

Our default waking mode (and also during dreaming phases of sleep) is not a brain at rest, but what is known as mind wandering.

obsessionally attached, non self-aware mind-wandering with no interrupt mechanisms (Ctrl-Z for you programmers), is bad.

‘Passion for the road,’ as I’ve come to understand it, is a unique mood or motivation with which one approaches being ‘on the road’ and the specific style that they bring.

For my father, it has everything to do with freedom, also possibility; who you might meet and what you might find out there.

Task-negative cognition on the other hand, is what your brain does when there is nothing in particular it has to do; when the situation has no demanding urgencies to attend to

Against these pressures, the act of walking might indeed prove revolutionary because it will afford us an experience of an alternative way of being in the world, one that honors the properly human scale of our experience.