What makes a wanderer?

What makes a wanderer? I like to think the wanderer is one who’s not tied down to particulars–no particular thought, no particular city, no particular person, no particular words. The wanderer is not anti-social, but a free spirit who interacts with whatever and whomever is around, who lives on foot, shoes or boots ready for walking, following where roads take. Equally at home with rich or poor, religious or profane, the intellectual or the instinctual, the wanderer doesn’t go around drinking the social koolaid. The wanderer hasn’t been everywhere, but has been enough places and in enough situations that the wool doesn’t slip easily over the eyes. The wanderer is male is female is adult is child is old is young is always looking to understand. The wanderer prefers knowing a person, a thing, an idea, to judging them, and perceives that human knowledge is an uncertain venture. The wanderer has seen enough to know what is hard to say, what is a stretch, what is a bit too rich to be believed from the lips of door-to-door salesmen and TV talking heads. The wanderer is a skeptic to the free-speaker and the know-it-all and a believer of the scarcely-heard and the downtrodden. The wanderer listens to the carefully spoken, the reserved and reflective, but turns a deaf ear to loudmouths and those who prey on a person’s fears. The wanderer is a believer in people and a believer in institutions. Not because an institution is anything in itself, but because the wanderer knows there is no outside without an inside, no up without a down, no outskirts without a city. The wanderer knows that all people are not the same, that every person has their own stride, their own talk, their own way of making it through the world. The wanderer sees no reason to make it otherwise–what kind of a dull world would that be? With no rebels, no dreamers, no straight suits, no unaccountable do-gooders, no takers, no givers, no followers, no pathfinders? The wanderer knows the world is only as good a place as the people who inhabit it, of which the wanderer is only one.

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