Wandering
For me, the best way to explain what wandering is is through a scene: a person walking down the street, someone else asks them “where are you going?”, and their answer is “I have no idea.” That’s really the whole thing in a nutshell — walking without a destination, without a “where to,” just the “how.”
That said, the best way I know to explain what wandering is and what it’s for is to read Yuval Ido Tal’s essay, “A Complete Recommendation for Training in Wandering” — a piece I’ve come back to many times over my years of practice.
Tal writes about what he calls “purposefulness-itis obsessivis” — our compulsive tendency to harness every action to a goal, a purpose, a “what for.” He describes how most of what we call “life” is really steps on the way to a destination, not the arrival itself — and how, too often, we neglect the steps in favor of the goal. The essay’s central insight, for me, comes down to one line:
“The question isn’t ‘where to?’ Maybe the question is ‘how?’”
That’s exactly the point that connects wandering, for me, to zazen shikantaza — in both, the moment you stop asking “where,” all that’s left is the “how”: how I’m walking, how I’m sitting, how I’m present with what’s here.