This blog is about all aspects of long-distance walking, hill walking, wandering, mountaineering and flâneuring.

I keep it as a diary and as a collection of Wander Lists of going after unstructured experiences.

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Sometimes I get a sudden urge to leave everything and find the sturdiest pair of walking boots and buy them and get a train ticket to the place I can’t even pronounce and walk around a lot and climb around a lot and laugh around a lot and wonder why I’m now in a place where it’s so often rainy and quite often scary and eat a lot of apples and take my walking boots everywhere and take my notebooks everywhere and forget about most things, except my lover and my first dog.

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To me, there are few things more grand and more enjoyable than long distance walking. With all my past walks, and talks about the walks, and dreams about the walks, I’ve developed a plan to write down all the different ways a walk or a trek can train, soothe and exhilarate the walker. So, to put it mildly, my aim is to map the epicness and the free-flowing beauty of these (small-size) expeditions where one can take the time to go along with their unfinished thoughts.

What do our minds do when we walk, trek or wander? What means do we use to read the environment and to choose our pace? In which way does the terrain and the space affect our thought processes and our body? How do we, the common city nomads, dream ourselves into all our possible futures, into our cyber-bohemias and star-kissed caravans? And why do we, most importantly, still face the need to go on a pilgrimage so often?

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Maybe, one day, I will start creating audio games for long distance walkers. Maybe this will become a new form of (very) environment specific theatre. This just might be where theatre, sports, active philosophy and cross-media games fully meet. However, there is a chance that I’ll just keep walking, either alone or with people who also wake up in the middle of the night with one leg stuck in their childhood and the other one dangling from the corner of the sky.

Have a good walk!

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Oh! And here is the very first blog post from this site, a charming attempt at summarising some wandering thoughts:

https://instituteofwander.com/2015/07/03/hello-world/