mind wandering

Every morning I go on a walk through my neighborhood. The air is cool and crisp, and tall trees framing both sides of the road make every street feel like a long corridor roofed with a canopy of leaves. There’s usually not many people out, and as the sun rises the only sound is the distant hum of cars and the chirping of birds. It’s peaceful.

Usually, I’ll listen to a podcast or music, but recently I’ve been leaving my airpods in the house and just walking without listening to anything. The first few times felt weird—which in and of itself is a sad thing to say—but now I’ve come to really enjoy it, because my mind wanders. There are no inputs, no distractions, just whatever pops into my brain. And what I’ve found is that I do my best thinking on these walks. It’s as if this particular part of my day creates this kind of fertile idea garden that’s only accessible while walking.

There’s a great app called Voicepal that records voice memos and transcribes them, then provides you with AI-generated follow-up questions based on whatever you say. I’ve been using it to just record my stream of consciousness as I walk (if I wasn’t worried about forgetting ideas I’d leave my phone at home), and then once I get home I copy the transcript into Notion, which then becomes the start of my writing for the day.

I suppose the point of this particular article of brain vomit is just that there’s value in letting your mind wander. There’s definitely a significant difference in my mood and clarity of thinking on days when I do these walks vs the odd day where I don’t, I can tell you that. I know for most people, it’s hard to create space and time in the day to do something like that, especially because there never seem to be enough hours in the day to do all the things you feel like you need to do, much less set aside time to intentionally do something “unproductive.”

But in my own experience, paradoxically, I’d argue that mind wandering is one of the most productive things you can do.