"The wandering man becomes a primitive man in so many ways, in the same way that the nomad is more primitive than the farmer. ... I am a nomad, not a farmer. I am an adorer of the unfaithful, the changing, the fantastic. I don't care to secure my love to one bare place on earth."
--Hermann Hesse
If you wish to create something genuine, then it’s a good idea to leave behind the familiar paths and step into the living world. I’m not saying to become a permanent vagabond, a homeless nomad. I’m just saying that it’s good for the spirit to break free from the fabricated world of convenience occasionally.
Spontaneity and whimsical activity help unsettle the dust of habit clinging to your soul.
Society is too much with us. We see too much. Hear too much. In this greatly digitalized world we inhabit, we’re inundated with far too much ruckus for our minds to assimilate. For nearly all of human history, our minds have evolved to process information in local, small-scale contexts, rather than on a vast scale as we see today.
To write, to create, one must first live. Not in the grinding wheels of repetition. Not bogged down by society’s profane obligations. But in the immediacy of direct experience, in the disquieted nuance of curiosity and discovery.
To be a creator is to descend into the dark chambers of the unconscious, where dreams and fears coalesce. It is to let the intellect yield to intuition and to make form from what stirs the spirit. It is to strike a match in the darkness of mere being.
In the words of Bukowski: we must bring our own light to the darkness. nobody is going to do it for us.
Life in its most dynamic sense begins where routine ends.
When you step beyond the cold, gray walls of duty and expectation, the senses bloom and the blood hastens. You start to feel again as the soul feels when it remembers it was meant to wander and to feed the flesh with dirt, wind, and open skies.
“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.”
~ Wendell Berry
Creation arises when our higher self emerges from the dregs of monotony.
You get this rare chance to meet the real you when you step away from the familiar—your home, your society, the safety net, all those tedious obligations and expectations. Don’t hibernate in one spot forever. Roam. Explore. Figure out who you are when no one’s telling you who you are or what to be.
“You must unlearn the habit of being someone else or nothing at all, of imitating the voices of others and mistaking the faces of others for your own.”
— Hermann Hesse
It’s no revelation to remind you that we live in a time of constant noise and chaos and unimaginable change. If we have any chance of a healthy future, we must reacquaint ourselves and retune our sensibilities to the natural rhythms that lie beyond the façade of appearances.
The creative life is born outside the confines of convention.
That’s what I’ve learned most from Hermann Hesse. This great 20th-century writer believed that wandering was an act of rebellion against the rigid norms and materialism of modern society. He viewed a sedentary life tied to possessions and social roles as stifling to the soul.
The one question he seems to ask in all his writings is this: Why burden your short life with endless chores, menial work, and useless obligations? Why let the clock slice up your life into forgettable fragments like shattered shards of glass in some forlorn back alley?
The faster and more feverish one lives pursuing the fabricated values of society—success, status, riches, the more strain there is on the senses. We see it all around. If you spend your days chasing some phantom ideal of success or happiness, you miss out on the sheer beauty of being alive. The essence of being.
By embracing the occasional wandering life, we break the chains of conformity and pursue authentic, individualistic paths. This is the motif central to Hesse’s most venerated characters.
You have Siddhartha, who abandons societal comforts to seek enlightenment.
You have Goldmund, who lives close to the earth, an artist who takes on the hardships and ecstasy that come with the quest to experience life fully through sensory and emotional immersion.
His characters seem to celebrate life’s transient beauty as they undertake a courageous pursuit of an authentic, self-determined existence, even in the face of suffering and impermanence.
Roaming through landscapes—forests, rivers, and mountains—awakens a sense of unity with the universe. This immersion in nature allows us to rise above our overinflated egos and tap into more profound truths.
The creative act is transcendental: it steps outside “the world.”
For Hesse, the wanderer’s solitude and encounters with the unknown fueled artistic expression and philosophical reflection, as seen in his own life of travel and introspective writing.
Influenced by Romanticism, Hesse idealized the wanderer as a solitary figure who lives on the margins of society, unburdened by conventional ties. Though he was an extremely “reasonable” thinker and writer, he believed that to live solely by “reason” is to live in an “arid land” of an unfulfilled life.
“Most people...are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.”
Wandering is vital because it’s how we shake off the stifling noise of a world gone mad. It’s about living with courage, curiosity, and a heart open to whatever comes next. In our frenzied, fast-paced world of automation and digital manipulation, I think we could all use a little more of that wandering spirit. Maybe it’s not about quitting your job and hitting the road. Or maybe it is.
Perhaps it’s just about carving out time to get away from the familiar brick-and-concrete life and immerse oneself in the silence and the aura of the natural world.
I’ll conclude with a poetic passage Hesse wrote in his 1946 anthology: If The War Goes On.
True action, good and radiant action, my friends, does not spring from activity, from busy bustling, it does not spring from industrious hammering.
It grows in the solitude of the mountains, it grows on the summits where silence and danger dwell. It grows out of the suffering which you have not yet learned to suffer…
Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear.
A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads lie in wait… Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism.
But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.
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