A wonderful quote from the book “Wanderlust,” by Rebecca Solnit, about the value of walking, meandering, and refusing to be held captive by modern-day conveniences that often do more to restrict and confine than to liberate and inspire:

New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them. Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued – that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive, or faster paced. . . . As a member of the self-employed whose time saved by technology can be lavished on day-dreams and meanders, I know these things have their uses, and use them – a truck, a computer, a modem – myself, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival. I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”