I wanted to go on a great pilgrimage so I sat still for a few hours.
Kabir
In The Wisdom of Anxiety, Alan Watts explores the “backwards law" or “the law of reversed effort.” This refers to the idea that: “When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float. When you hold your breath, you lose it.” The book explores the relationship between this law and the “quest for psychological security…in a time when human life seems to be so peculiarly insecure and uncertain”. He argues that “this insecurity is the result of trying to be secure, and that, contrariwise, salvation and sanity consist in the most radical recognition that we have no way of saving ourselves.”
In a world so concerned with the meaning inscribed in our hearts, it’s strange that we’ve chosen to plan our way towards its secrets. The search for meaning has been reduced to scrambling for order. Despite all our planning, life happens anyway, alongside us. And in those moments where we’re forced to look back, none of us can believe or could have known the paths our lives have taken.
If the stories of our lives did not wander on their own, then everything would be predictable and worthless. But everything important seems to have its source in a story being written for us, not by us. Truths are stumbled upon. Happiness is incidental. Love, accidental. Passions are predetermined. Luck and grace, undeserved. Life meanders on its own towards our destiny.
Humanity has grown suspicious of an unguided life. Seemingly directionless and noncommittal, wandering is an enemy of modernity. For some reason, we’re convinced that being the author of our lives is non-negotiable. We think of wandering as an escape or a cop out. But when Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) left the world, he did so in order to get closer to it. And in doing so, he revealed another paradox at the bottom of our existence — every arrival is a return, the way back home is down the path that leads away from it.
Goodbye, small farmhouse and my native country. I leave you as a young man leaves his mother: he knows it is time for him to leave her, and he knows, too, he can never leave her completely, even though he wants to.
Upon return to civilian life in 1919, after serving in the Imperial Army during the First World War, Hesse’s marriage fell apart. He sent a letter to his friend, Romain Rolland: "I have had to bear a very heavy burden in my personal life in recent years. Now I am about to go to Ticino once again, to live for a while as a hermit in nature and in my work." Life falls apart when it cannot sustain the lies that hold it together. When Hesse’s body could no longer live his false identities, it asked him to go for a walk. After passing by a farmhouse at the beginning of his journey, he wrote:
Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life. I wanted to be something I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middle class person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both...
Alone in the mountains, he had no one left to lie to. But an honest life isn’t one with simple and easy answers. Although Hesse knew that he was a wanderer, being a wanderer didn’t mean anything in particular. It meant being in-between, it meant living a life that “hovers between many poles and counterpoles. A longing for home here, a longing for wandering there. A longing for loneliness and cloister here, and an urge for love and community there…” Wandering meant being unsettled and volatile and embracing that:
There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to sunlight and your pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to filth and nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death.
Say yes to everything, shirk nothing, don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen, you are not a Greek, you are not harmonious, or the master of yourself, you are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you. How much you have lied!
Unlike those of us who travel to “find ourselves”, Hesse wasn’t interested in self-resolution or a clear and final statement on the self:
Beneath those heavens I will be happy sometimes and sometimes I will be homesick beneath them. The complete.man that I am the pure wanderer, mustn't think about homesickness. But I know it, I am not complete, and I do not even strive to be complete. I want to taste my homesickness as I taste my joy.
Those ambitions belonged to society, and he was no longer part of it. His life in the mountains needed no justification:
Thoughts and sorrows seem to have remained on the other side of the mountains. Between tormented and hateful deeds, a person has to think and sorrow so much! Back there it is so difficult and so desperately important to find a reason for staying alive. How else should a person go on living? Sheer misery makes one profound. But here there are no problems, mere existence needs no justification, thinking becomes a game. A person discovers: the world is beautiful and life is brief. Some longings remain unsatisfied.
What Hesse uncovers during his journey is an intimate and paradoxical relationship between wandering and home. When we walk away from somewhere, we have already carved the path backwards. But home is not where we began, it’s at the end of the road we’re on:
But all the waters of the world find one another again, and the Arctic sea and the Nile gather together in the moist flight of clouds...Every road leads us wanderers too back home.
He unravels this difficult idea whilst reflecting on trees:
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
Trees...are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.
Like branches, we grow towards the light. Wandering is the method by which we fulfil ourselves. Wandering isn’t aimless. It is guided by our unconscious and our spirit, which want us to grow as we’re supposed to, into the self we haven’t been able to articulate.
The closest most of us get to wandering is in our urge to run away. In these unbearable moments, Hesse tells us to listen to the trees:
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts...You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to mother. Home is neither here not there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
In Steppenwolf, reflecting on human nature, Hesse wrote that man’s “innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother.” Hesse’s mother died in 1902 and he spent the rest of his life looking for her. The mother, then, isn’t only Mother Earth, it is Hesse’s mother too. It was likely his voice that spoke through Goldmund when he addressed Narcissus on his deathbed:
Listen to me another moment. I wanted to tell you about my mother, and how she keeps her fingers clasped around my heart. For many years it has been my most cherished, my secret dream to make a statue of the mother. She was to me the most sacred of all my images; I have carried her always inside me, figure of love and mystery.
Only a short while ago it would have been unbearable to me to think that I might die without having carved her statue; my life would have seemed useless to me. And now see how strangely things have turned out: it is not my hands that shape and form her; it is her hands that shape and form me.
But...she doesn't want me to make her secret visible. She rather wants me to die. I'm glad to die; she is making it easy for me.
We are always walking away from and towards the Mother. Every step away from home and mother is a step away from the womb. Every step towards home and mother is a step into the world, where our mothers are waiting to welcome us and to leave us. We are born into our mother’s arms, which are the Earth, and when we die, we fall into the arms of Mother Earth.
Wandering is an act of letting go. It always requires leaving something behind. It ends in the knowledge that letting go can only take us so far. If we cannot let go of our parents, it’s because we’re supposed to return to them. If the past continues to haunt us, it’s because it’s ours and it holds our fate. If we cannot let go of the past, it’s because it’s holding on to us.
A longing to wander is a longing for home. It is a request for permission to settle, for a signal from somewhere in this world, that we’ll be just fine wherever we are. When we want to wander, just like when we want to run away, we are asking our hearts to be brave enough and kind enough to find their homes in our bodies.
When we’re wandering, we’re on our way to a revelation and a resting place. Somewhere that we’re going to settle into, even if only for a little while. That’s why all roads take wanderers back home, they take them somewhere where they can settle. Every path leads us home because that’s the only place it can lead to. We wander in order to go back home again. We wander in order to return to our mother’s arms.