Wonderoom

I did a couple of things that I haven’t done in a while today.  Things which used to be a common occurrence for me.  One, I took a walk.  A ramble.  A stroll around the neighborhood.  Another, I started a reading a book.  Not just any book, but a book of essays.  Not something off a website.  Not a story to lose myself in, but the kind of book that really get me thinking.  In this case it is Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit.  A book about walking.

I definitely need to get out into the world.  I’m not exactly agoraphobic.  I don’t break out in a sweat or anything at the prospect of walking out the door.  More like agoravoidic.  Agorapathy.  I don’t get out enough.  The walls of my tiny apartment close in on me sometimes in a most unpleasant way.  It’s just that I can’t think of anywhere to go.  Everything seems so product oriented.

This paucity of destinations brings the word discombobulated to mind.  I’ve always assumed that discombomulate was a perfectly respectable, ancient, learned word.  But this is not the case.  Discombobulate originated in the early 1800’s in America.  Something along the lines of discomfit or discompose thrown into the frontier verbal meat-grinder of young America.  Discombobulate sounds like what it is.  It is also what I am.  Discombobulated, confused, lost, detached, reassembled from places disparate.  When one is feeling like this one wants roots, feelers to stick into the ground and soak up nutrients.  Some ground of being.

Which brings me back to walking.  I’ve always thought about my mind as a series of inner landscapes…mountains and oceansides that I visit in memories and dreams.  Solnit reasons that the “mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.”  So walking is a way to visit your mind.  A way to ground yourself by literally moving over the ground.  My mind and my sense of self is not separate from my surroundings.

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