The pace of our usual life, the sense that we’re always Doing Important Stuff (or at least called to be doing so) sometimes makes me think we’ve all forgotten how to just take a little aimless stroll. Perhaps it does feel like a forbidden pleasure when I know a project’s been lying there waiting for my attention. All the better, then, for its seeming truancy.
I’m happy to take the medical advice against sedentary death as a validation of my going for regular meanders off the normal path, if it takes me away from my current tasks, however directionless my saunters may appear. The mere physical reset is practically guaranteed to get my brain working a little better, and that alone is never a bad thing. The bits and bytes of information that slip into my mind both consciously and subconsciously act to refresh me for the work in hand and to remind me of other things I might have missed or laid aside.
I shan’t dissemble about it, though: when I get up and move, it’s mostly because I can feed my infatuation with observation. I’m just another, albeit less smooth, flâneur slouching about the avenue in search of stories to be filed under Little Adventures. No matter if they’re mine or—more likely—entirely imagined scenarios built around the lives happening all around me, to restock this collection is to refuel myself and find purpose again in both my work and my play. Then I can stroll on back to the real task at hand, and if the street has quieted or the hall emptied by then, I’ve populated my imaginings with enough enlivening Important Stuff to keep me going until my next outing.
Art-Colored Glasses 
Beautiful
Thank you, Sir. I think perhaps we might have strolled past each other a time or two, given the winding paths both of our minds seem to take. 🙂
Maybe!
Kath, this is so wonderful. I love the cadence of it and most of all the insight and meaning into such a small thing we do.
Thank you, Laura! I get as much pleasure and refreshment and inspiration from my vicarious wanderings through your lens as well!
xo
You’re welcome and thank YOU! 🙂
What fun, your “flaneur slouching about the avenue”!! (sadly, this chromebook has no French keyboard, it seems). Everything is foodstuff for your creative mind, Kathryn:0))
That, as I know you also know from practice, is how invention works: storing up seemingly random and inconsequential stuff until it coalesces in its own good time into the Idea for which it was meant by the universe. 😉
xoxo
Well, from one flaneur to another, I would love to join you in your flanerie, and see what joyful little snippets of this and that we could find to rejuvenate and inspire.
We should probably don our flannels for the expedition, eh! Join me any time at all, my dear! 😀
xo
Keep on wandering…
Impossible to stop, once we’ve discovered the joys of it, no? 🙂
LOL