I pinched a sentence from Francesca Ferrando’s The …

I pinched a sentence from Francesca Ferrando’s The Art of Being Posthuman:

Life is a journey, and we are the wanderers: anything can happen, and eventually does.

I like the mischief in that last clause. You think you’ve seen everything? Just you wait.

But it’s the word wanderers that keeps me here. I can travel with a destination, a booking confirmation and a fairly firm idea of what I intend to find. Wandering asks me to leave some room. I can have a direction without deciding in advance what the world is allowed to show me.

Imagine going out for a newspaper and overhearing something in a café that sends you back to a book you haven’t thought about for twenty years. By the time you get home, you’re following a question that wasn’t there when you left. You’ve barely gone anywhere, yet you have something new to think about.

That’s close to what I mean when I say I want to live in a way that maximises my freedom to explore. I want enough room in my life to follow an interest before I know what it’s for. I don’t want to make every curiosity justify itself against a plan. Some of the things worth finding won’t look useful from where I’m standing now.

There’s a temptation to make this sound easier than it is. “Anything can happen” includes the phone call you don’t want, the illness, the loss. We don’t all have the same freedom to take a detour, either. Money, health and the people who depend on us have a say. A philosophy of wandering has to live in the same world as those obligations.

I can hear “and eventually does” differently once I let that in. Taken literally, it promises too much. Plenty of possibilities will never happen. But I recognise the feeling: living long enough to encounter something I’d never have thought to include in my picture of a life. I can’t secure myself against all surprise, and I don’t want to spend the whole journey trying.

Then there’s the person doing the wandering. I’ve been thinking about how much time we can spend trying to settle who we are before allowing ourselves to get on with living. As if I need to finish the description before I can leave the house.

Ferrando’s sentence has me wondering how much of that description I’ll have to revise along the way. A book gives me words for something I couldn’t articulate. A conversation unsettles an opinion I’d stopped examining. Working with AI lets me pursue an association through dialogue, and I find myself thinking something I hadn’t brought to the conversation. The books, people and technologies I encounter participate in who I’m becoming. Even the paths available to me owe something to other people, other creatures and the places we share.

I don’t arrive at the world as a finished person. I’m involved in it, and I change through that involvement. That leaves the question of who I am open in a way I find inviting.

The image I keep coming back to is a city whose streets rearrange themselves as I walk. I’m trying to draw a reliable map, but by the time I’ve finished one neighbourhood, I’ve found an alley I didn’t know existed. Someone is coming the other way. They seem to recognise me.

I haven’t decided whether to ask them for directions.