Robert Breen

📷 April 2024 Micro.Blog photo challenge, Day 16: flâneur

Today’s photo theme reminds me of Vacilando, which I learned from this passage in Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck:

In Spanish there is a word for which I can’t find a counterword in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction. My friend Jack Wagner has often, in Mexico, assumed this state of being. Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico City but not at random. We would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it.