Peripatetic

To wander and wonder

Peripatetic is a great word that I have used for many years to describe my habit of wandering from place to place in the house, picking up a dish here, dropping off a book there, often misplacing things in my travels. My daughter-in-law even gave me an air tag strapped to a rainbow bracelet for my coffee cup. I’m not going to tell her I misplaced that, too.

“Peripatetic” is wandering, but it’s more generally used to describe what a commuter does, to and fro. It can also refer to a pilgrim or a rambler or an itinerant professor or laborer. But my favorite side of the word—the side that I was leaning into when I described myself as peripatetic—is about Aristotle’ s habit of walking as he lectured, pacing back and forth through the Lyceum in Athens. His students were required to follow him as he walked and talked and thought and they became known as “peripatetics” from the name of the cloister (peripatos) where they walked.

I am definitely not teaching anybody anything as I wander, but I am thinking. Just not about where I am. Or what I’m doing. I’m just musing my way from the right half of my cerebrum where an idea is incubating to the left half which is in charge of words to describe it. Sometimes the idea gets stalled in the wrinkly crevasse between hemispheres so I wander on wondering. Searching, searching. Then like a magpie , suddenly, I see that shiny object—the word or sentence or paragraph I needed. Eureka! — that’s Greek for “I have found it!” Now there’s a word you can play with.