People are surprised by death, but not by life.

Another day (in Clara) involved doing much else, as well as the owrt, not least further thinking. But let us concentrate on the former. The importance of walking around cannot be underestimated. From Baudelaire the Flâneur, to Guy Debord and the Situationist’s invention of the Dérive, the continuing interest in psychogeography, Jonathan Swain’s 977 km walk to Dignitas, Zurich http://www.jonathanswain.net/the-you-you-meet-en-route, Margaretta Jolly’s various antics https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/newpathways/introduction/ and Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Getting-Lost-ebook/dp/B002GOP9FY/ this is an important human behaviour. You could get all evolutionary-psychologist about it and wonder about Mitochondrial Eve’s descendants wandering out of Africa. I would like to imagine that the desire to keep moving is driven by curiosity but presumably it was necessary for other reasons to be nomadic. Lest we forget, many also have to travel, and have had to leave their home-turf for rotten reasons. Emigration was not a hobby for impoverished Irish people historically, and is not now for those fleeing conflict and horror in many parts of the globe. Since the 1990s it has been possible to browse, navigate and explore online, and before that for a few hundred years you had books and libraries and other kinds of exhibiting but as Tomasz Madajczak was reminding me earlier, having a body matters. I used to joke that I see my body merely as a transport mechanism for my brain, and food merely as fuel to drive that engine, but in truth I feel like that only on some days. As I type here it is exciting to tune in to the fingers as they dance about the keyboard, and then realise that these ten beauties, these phalanges, including two delicious looking thumbs, are part of me. Keepin’ it digital as always.

Have a gif(t): https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/18277608427132805/