Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Around 629 CE a Chinese monk named Xuanzang slipped out of the Tang empire without permission, since the emperor had forbidden foreign travel, and set off to find the original teachings of the Buddha in India. He crossed deserts and mountains, was nearly killed by bandits, and spent years studying at Nalanda before returning sixteen years later with hundreds of manuscripts. Many of his contemporaries would have called his journey reckless. In The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien gives a line to such figures, in a verse about the mysterious ranger Aragorn, that not all those who wander are lost.

The line works as a defence of the unplanned life. We tend to assume that someone without a fixed route is aimless, a drifter who has failed to choose. Tolkien suggests that the appearance can mislead. The ranger who seems to be roaming is watching over the land, and the apparent idler may be on a course that has reasons he has not announced. Wandering and being lost are different conditions, though to an observer they look alike.

Indian tradition has long honoured the wanderer. The ideal of the parivrajaka, the renunciant who owns nothing and stays nowhere long, is part of the tradition from the Upanishads onward. The Buddha himself left his father's palace at twenty nine to look for an answer to suffering, and spent years wandering before he found it under a tree at Bodh Gaya. Rahul Sankrityayan, the great traveller and scholar who crossed the Himalayas into Tibet several times, wrote a manifesto for the wandering life in 1949 titled Ghumakkad Shastra, the science of the wanderer.

Wandering has also been the source of many discoveries. In 1928 Alexander Fleming returned from a holiday to find that a mould had contaminated a plate of bacteria and killed those near it. He might have thrown it away, but he looked, and penicillin followed. In 1941 George de Mestral came home from a walk in the Swiss hills with burrs stuck to his dog and clothes, examined them under a microscope and began the work that led to Velcro. The English word serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole in 1754 from the old name for Sri Lanka, describes just such luck. Luck favours the person who has gone out without a plan.

Luck favours the person who has gone out without a plan.

Darwin's voyage on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836 was not designed to produce a theory of evolution. He had been invited as a gentleman companion for the captain. The notebooks he filled in Patagonia and on the Galapagos were the product of curiosity without a set question. Gandhi too was advised by his political mentor Gokhale, on his return from South Africa in 1915, to spend a year travelling through India in third class railway carriages without speaking publicly. The year of apparent drift gave him an understanding of the country that no study could have supplied.

Psychologists who study decision making have given the intuition a name. In exploring, an agent must balance exploiting what it already knows against exploring what it does not. A person who always follows the known road earns steady returns and never finds a better one. A person who explores accepts short term losses for the chance of learning something. Young people who try different subjects, jobs and cities before committing may seem unfocused, but they are gathering information that early specialists lack. Wandering, in this sense, is a method of search.

Ibn Battuta left Tangier in 1325 intending a pilgrimage to Mecca and did not return for about twenty four years, having travelled some hundred thousand kilometres across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. He had no plan beyond the next city, served for some years as a judge in Delhi under Muhammad bin Tughluq, and dictated his account only after coming home. Which of his wanderings were rooted in purpose and which in appetite he himself could probably not have said. Musicians call something similar improvisation, in which a performer who follows no written score still plays within a raga that gives the wandering a shape.

Yet the saying does not mean that all wandering is good. Some are lost, and the topic is careful in saying not all. A refugee fleeing a war with no destination is not exploring but surviving. A young person who drifts from job to job and city to city without ever asking what he wants may be fleeing a question and calling it freedom. The difference between a wanderer and a lost person is not in the path, which may look the same, but in the presence of a compass inside, a sense of what one is looking for, even if one does not yet know where it is.

This is why the saying is hard to apply to ourselves. From the outside it may be possible to see that a person has a purpose, and from the inside the feeling of drift is the same in both cases. A person cannot easily say whether his uncertainty is the preparation of an explorer or the confusion of a stray. Families and societies add pressure on this point, urging early commitment to a profession and a path, and often punishing those who take the longer road. A culture that makes room for the wanderer, with gap years, sabbaticals and second chances, may find that it gains more than it loses.

Perhaps the best test is retrospective, since we judge wanderers by what they brought back. Xuanzang's journey looks wise because he returned with the books, and had he died in the desert he would be remembered as a fool. Many who wandered and found nothing are forgotten, as survivors tell the stories. The line therefore praises a risk, and it offers no guarantee that the risk will pay, and the word not is doing delicate work. It is possible that the real difference between being lost and being on a journey is a matter of what the traveller later chooses to call it.