You are listening to Designed to be Awake with Mick Kubiak.
Hello friends,
And welcome to another episode of Designed to be Awake with Mick Kubiak.
This episode,
It's a shorty.
You have a little assignment in here,
You could just do it any time,
And it's called wandering.
And it sounds like vaguely druid-like or something,
But you basically just go out for a wander.
And you go out intentionally,
You kind of almost have to stop yourself from knowing,
Trying to know.
It's fascinating to watch your own mind struggle with it.
So many of these things,
Well,
All of life I would claim actually,
Is just an opportunity to observe the contents of our own minds.
You know,
This world is just a mirror and an opportunity and a dance.
Hello.
Welcome to another episode.
Today what I wanted to talk about is wandering.
Wandering is a practice.
I know it just sounds like something that you randomly do sometimes,
You're just wandering around,
You don't know what to do.
It sounds kind of like aimless wandering.
I'm just kind of wandering around.
And in fact it is,
It is all those aimless,
It is.
And that's the beautiful thing about wandering.
And when you actually choose to practice wandering,
It really gets quite interesting because you're consciously letting go of imagining that you're going somewhere,
And yet you're moving.
So a simple version of wandering is just to step out your front door and just wait for an impulse to move.
Like,
Are you going to go left?
You're going to go right?
You're going to walk straight?
You wait to find out.
And you feel an impulse and you just go that way.
And then you just keep going.
You might plan to wander for 15 minutes.
That's a brief wandering,
In my opinion.
I think an hour of wandering is really cool because it challenges so many of the mechanisms that we have in place for feeling in control and for feeling like we need to be in control.
I know where I'm going.
This is the destination.
I've got a plan.
I'm doing it.
And sometimes that's fun.
I mean,
I actually love just being like busy and intentional,
Moving really quickly and checking things off my list.
And it's fun.
Like,
Speed is fun.
And so is knowing and intention.
It's just that I think we're stuck in that a lot.
And we don't often let ourselves just not know and experience what it's like to not know.
We've been taught that knowing is the ideal.
You know where you're going.
And it's not really.
It's just one way of doing things.
It's very active.
It's very purposeful.
It's very intentional.
And it's good in balance.
It's just also really good to try something different.
Try moving through the world with a different intention.
Try not knowing.
I don't know where I'm going.
I have no idea what I'm doing and I have no intention of finding out.
I'm just going to wander.
I might go buy a store and then I'll go in there and I'll find out what's going to happen.
I don't know in advance.
I'm going to run into somebody and instead of being like,
Oh,
I know what I'm going to.
Hi,
How are you?
Like I've got my social nicety groove on.
Instead,
Just look at the person,
You know,
Connect.
Just take a breath and really look at the person.
We don't do that a lot.
Don't freak anybody out.
Although,
Why not?
Go ahead.
I don't care.
Freak someone out.
They'll be like,
I saw Mick and she just stared at me and breathed.
It's weird.
I don't do that to people.
I do have a,
You know,
A mechanism that kicks in to make sure everyone's comfortable.
And we all have that.
And I am fighting that a bit in myself,
Not for the purpose of making other people uncomfortable by any means,
But just to drop into the openness.
I don't think we realize how our programming,
How having a way of doing things,
A way of talking to people,
A way of running into people,
A way of going about our days.
I don't think we realize how limiting that is and how much it limits our experience of life.
And there's that very common cliche,
Like,
We're not human doings,
We're human beings.
And yet we really are acting like human doings most of the time.
And this experience of being is not even really something anyone talks to you about.
I know my mom just thought Zen meditation was just insane.
She said,
I don't know what they're doing.
They're just kind of zonked out.
And I was like,
Actually,
You're zonked out.
Okay,
They're actually present.
God,
God bless her.
I love my mom.
But she didn't get any of this at all.
She was always on purpose,
Always doing stuff,
But actually also a pretty cool person and Zen'd out in her own way.
She just,
She just did it differently.
But she didn't get the idea of like stopping and just being.
And that's what meditation is,
Is just trying to start to get you to think about doing.
Don't just do something,
Sit there,
Right?
Another little spiritual cliche that you see around,
Don't just do something,
Sit there.
So that's why we're sitting,
Because we're just trying to counteract this other way of being that's so dominant in the world today.
And that we just do because we've been programmed.
And what we want to start doing as we grow more conscious and expand our awareness is to do less and less of what's programmed and to start to become free.
And so something as simple as wandering is actually an act of self liberation from programming,
From expectations,
From the normal way.
And so this is just a short little episode suggesting that you find some time today or this week to wander.
Don't know,
Take some time not knowing where you're going,
Who you're going to see,
What you're going to say when you see someone,
Who they are.
If you encounter someone and you can already see it,
Right?
You see your neighbor coming down the street,
You've already got an entire story about them.
You like them or you don't like them.
They annoy you or they seem kind of,
Are they aloof?
I don't know.
They're friendly,
Overly friendly.
Oh God,
This is going to be exhausting.
I can't.
Right?
Immediately we just crowd the moment with stories from the past.
And if you can start to see those stories rise up and start to kind of pull you into their tale,
If you can see it,
You can start to put some space around it and kind of pull back from it,
Pull back from the story of who this person is.
Because the reality is you have no idea,
Right?
You know they're programming,
But there's something else there too.
And how much of the way people are to us has to do with how we are to them,
I would say a lot.
So the idea of just dropping your story and encountering the person as if you're seeing them for the first time,
You don't know who they are,
Is a really interesting exercise.
And in my experience,
It has opened up doors that I didn't know were there.
So yeah,
That's a little extra thought.
And that's it for this episode.
Have a wonderful wander.
Thank you so much for listening today.
This episode and every episode would be impossible without my amazing team,
The brilliant Chase Coughlin,
Who not only edits every episode,
But also composed the music for the show,
As well as Maya Young.
If you enjoyed listening,
Please leave us a review.
Thank you so much for listening,
And I will see you next time.
