When I say I have a wandering mind I mean that my mind goes off on hiking trips for days. Spontaneously, ill-advised, and often through uncharted territory. And it certainly doesn’t tend to look where it’s going. My mind is prone to getting lost. Forgetting compass and boots at home, and ending up walking in circles within a cloud with increasingly damp feet.
When I say I have a wandering mind I mean it likes to go on adventures. Like joining an imaginary fellowship to destroy an evil trinket in a faraway volcano. My mind has built colonies on the Moon and travelled between galaxies. It has travelled through time just to check out what the weather was like on Antarctica a couple of hundred million years ago. And it likes to travel forward far enough that humanity has changed into an entirely different sort of being.
When I say I have a wandering mind I mean I have a wondering mind. As in “I wonder what would happen if I jumped off that cliff over there?” or “I wonder if the person lying next to me here in bed is secretly out to kill me?”. Sometimes I wish it was more prone to conviction than questioning.
When I say I have a wandering mind, sometimes I mean I have a dancing mind. When the inner turmoil is drowned out by music and imaginary dance routines of impossible complexity.
When I say I have a wandering mind, I mean I have a poetic mind. A mind that collects words and phrases it happens across like interesting seashells on a beach, keeping them rattling around for hours, days or years until they fall into place in a verse or a story. My mind likes to stride to rhythms iambic or trocheeic, and sometimes roaming freely.
So when I say I have a wandering mind, I don’t mean it in a literal sense. I mean it in a literary sense.
Love and wanderlust,
Winterdragon
