With a great deal of matters in life, there are layers. It is not necessarily that some layers are superior to others, but layers are different. There was a time in life after the Great Recession where, until the condition of my feet made it impossible to continue to do so, I was a door to door salesman. It was interesting work, and among the more interesting aspects of it was the way that it demonstrated to me that there was a lot more to many areas than it was capable to see while driving a car along a road. The level of knowledge that one has about the businesses that existed in a given area varies proportionally to the speed that one passes along. The slower the speed, the more one can notice along the way–the faster the speed, and the more things fly by.

One might think, if one was facile-minded, that a slow speed was better because it allowed one to see more. In some cases, that is a sensible enough belief. If one is in areas that one desires to know deeply, like one’s own neighborhood or a shopping center or mall that one enjoys walking through and spending time getting to know, walking (to the extent that one is able to do so) is a sensible enough way to pass through the territory. The gain that one makes in terms of one’s local knowledge is worth the expenditure of time to increase that knowledge of an area and the people and businesses within it. The same is true when we take a tour of a friend’s home or yard, in that it is enjoyable to know such places well and it is worth the time spent to familiarize oneself with how the home is laid out and what cutlery is placed where, or where the bookshelves or electrical outlets are, especially if one is staying over at a place.

It ought to be obvious, though, that not all places are places that one wants to move at a slow pace in order to know better. There are vast amounts of space that one may often wish to speed through as quickly as possible because they hold little or no interest in themselves. If mankind ever travels into deep space, for example, there will be a great amount of space that holds little or no interest for people and that we will seek to pass through as quickly as possible, using whatever means are available to shorten what could otherwise take years or generations even at very high-speed travel. If one is pondering the massive gulf of empty space that exists between planets or even more so between stars or still more so between galaxies or yet more so between groups of galaxies, that empty space may take staggering amounts of time to pass through without providing anything of interest the entire time. In such a situation, finding means of shortening the time wasted in such travel would be of paramount importance.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, of our own travels even within our own world and the small local areas we may know within it. We may have a great deal of interest in knowing the woods that are close to home or the park that is close to work, and may wish to spend time walking or bicycling or otherwise spending a fair bit of time moving through such spaces that we may know them intimately. On the other hand, we might be far more hostile seeking to spend hours hiking through cornfields or soybean fields that look roughly the same mile after mile in Nebraska or Kansas or Iowa or somewhere like that. We may also not think it worthwhile to become acquainted with every kelp bed within the wide Sargasso Sea given how much time it would take for us to travel along the Gulf Stream from Florida to Western Europe by floating along the way, time that we would have to take seeking the food and fresh water that was necessary to sustain ourselves along the way.

When we are evaluating the layers of knowledge that exist about a particular thing or a particular place, we must always weigh and balance various factors, including the amount of time we have or want to spend to acquire that knowledge and the amount of time that is necessary to reach that level of understanding. There are some things we might feel content to pass through or pass over quickly, while there are going to be other things that we want to slow down and take the time to savor and enjoy and understand in considerable depth. Different people will have different grounds for making these decisions and may very well have different answers as to the best way to pass through life and spend the limited amount of time that we have in this life. Not everyone will make the same decisions about what depth of knowledge they wish to have about any particular place or thing. At least in theory, there should be nothing wrong with that, but in this world such differences often make a huge difference in the way that we seek to organize and structure space according to our goals to putter about or quickly zoom our way through.