Wandering on the road with Kerouac and the unknown

If we have no expectations, then everything which comes before us in life is wholly unexpected, miraculous, given, and wonderful.

"I don't even know what I'm hoping to find", sang Jackson Brown.

This is a beautiful, or perhaps disquieting perspective- that when we look with complete clarity, we 'find' nothing except ourselves looking for nothing, and yet looking at everything.

            Jack Kerouac relates this observation of one of his footloose associates, stating: “You know, I think it doesn’t make any difference to him anyway. He’s just satisfied to wander around and forget things. And pat his belly and look at things as they are.” (Dharma Bums, p57)

Cat Stevens knew this, when he wrote, "In the end I'll know, but on the way I wonder."

That is, 'on the way' it is not our task to stop, to study, to memorize, or to plan what we shall do when we make our way around the next turn, for we do not know what lies ahead, it is our task only to keep walking, and walking, and basking in the never-ending banquet of splendor and novelty. We cannot know which way to go, we can only go.

"Listen to the call," suggests Osho, "be adventurous, and go on the unknown, uncharted ways of life...without any maps and without any paths- and nobody to lead you. ...My [way] is a wandering." (Ecstasy, p34,42)

And Louise Bogan suggests that in fact the journey has already begun, that we are in the midst of it, and that we only have to see this clearly- that where we are is itself an enigmatic stepping-stone along the way. She says:

“The initial mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveller reach his starting point in the first place? How did I reach the window, the walls, the fireplace, the room itself; how do I happen to be beneath this ceiling and above this floor? ...I have no maps to hand, no globe of the terrestrial or the celestial spheres, no chart of mountains, lakes, no sextant, no artificial horizon. If ever I possessed a compass, it has long since disappeared.” (Journey Around My Room)

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These excerpts on following the heart and aimless wandering are taken from unpublished chapters of THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas