Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
by Parker · 79 things on Twos
- Vagabonding: (1) the act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time. (2) A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit. (3) A deliberate way of living that makes freedom to travel possible
- “Research your own experiences for the truth, absorb what is useful, add what is specifically your own. The creating individual is more than any style or system.” - Bruce Lee
- The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that were too poor to buy our freedom
- Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions
- Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word
- Vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it
- “We spend the best part of our life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” - Henry David Thoreau
- Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world
- Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life
- Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate
- “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him.” - Henry David Thoreau
- “I don’t like work but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself.” - Joseph Conrad
- “Wanting to travel reflects a positive attitude. You want to see, to grow in experience, and presumably to become more whole as a human being. Vagabonding takes this a step further: it promotes the chances of sustaining and strengthening this positive attitude. As a vagabond, you begin to face your fears now and then instead of continuously sidestepping them in the name of convenience. You build an attitude that makes life more rewarding, which in turn makes it easier to keep doing it. It’s called positive feedback, and it works.” - Ed Buryn
- “We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.” - Edward Abbey
- The first step of vagabonding is simply a matter of making work serve your interests, instead of the other way around
- “The act of quitting means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in ones journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting—whether a job or a habit—means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.” - Pico Iyer
- Whoever loves money never has enough
- It’s pointless for a man to gain the whole world, yet lose his very self
- Seeking happiness in ones material desires is as absurd as suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes
- Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live
- “Any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travels or a good library will in the end he much more respected than if he behaved exactly like everyone else.” - Bertrand Russell
- “It is east in the world to live after the worlds opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- People might take your growing freedom as a subtle criticism of their own way of life. Because your fresh worldview might appear to call their own values into question (or, at least, force them to consider those values in a new light), they will tend to write you off as irresponsible and self-indulgent. Let them. Vagabonding is not an ideology, a balm for societal ills, or a token of social status. Vagabonding is, was, and always will be a private undertaking—and its goal is to improve your life not in relation to your neighbors but in relation to yourself
- “‘Someday’ (‘someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that’) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and cons lists—one of my previous favorites—are just as bad. If it’s important to you, and you want to do it eventually, just do it, and correct course along the way. Fortune favors the bold.” - Tim Ferriss
- “Don’t let yourself get talked out of your travel dream. Leaving actually turned out to be much harder than the travel experience. Just go!” - Ann Van Loen
- “Your freedom matters more than anything. And you win that freedom the moment you make the decision to hit the road. When you commit 100 percent to your dream and you begin doing the work necessary to free yourself and more into the new reality of traveling, you’re already on the road.” - Jenn Miller
- “Here’s a fun, money-saving trick I use: I give up some luxury at home, and instead visualize an experience I could only have on the road.” - Derek Orth
- “Selling, donating, and just disposing of material possessions frees you to focus on what’s really important. Hint: it’s not the stuff.” - Noah Van Loen
- “My greatest skill has been to want little.” - Henry David Thoreau
- All material possessions beyond basic necessities are an obstacle to true living
- Wealth is found not in what you own but in how you spend your time
- “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” - Henry David Thoreau
- You will never be able to truly appreciate the unexpected marvels of travel if you rely too heavily on your homework and ignore what is right before your eyes
- The most vivid travel experiences usually find you by accident, and the qualities that will make you fall in love with a place are rarely the features that took you there.
- The discoveries that come with travel have long been considered the purest form of education a person can acquire
- “Don’t ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live.” - Lavinia Spalding
- “Traveler, there is no path, paths are made by walking.” - Antonio Machado
- Don’t set limits on what you can or can’t do. Don’t set limits on what is or isn’t worthy of your time. Dare yourself to play games with you day: watch, wait, listen; allow things to happen
- “What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you’re not in a hurry.” - Paul Theroux
- “We see as we are.” - Buddha
- If you continually view other people through your own values, you’ll lose the opportunity to see the world through their eyes
- The ability to laugh at yourself and take things in stride can be the key to enduring strange new cultural situations
- “It’s always the people who make the journey. Say ‘yes’ as much as possible, leave your shy side at home, and let loose.” - Johnny Ward
- Having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment
- You first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability
- Divining chance means leaving yourself open to both good and bad experiences
- Trust chance and steer it in such a way that you’re always learning from it
- “Explore your own higher latitudes. Be a Columbus to whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” - Henry David Thoreau
- “Good people keep walking whatever happens. They do not speak vain words and are the same in good fortune and bad.” - Buddha
- “The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances.” - Aristotle
- Learn to treasure your worst experiences as gripping new chapters in the epic novel that is your life
- “Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Each moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such.” - Henry Miller
- It’s important, even on a personal level, to not just look at things as we travel but to see things for what they are
- “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” - G. K. Chesterton
- “Most people are on the world, not in it—having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.” - John Muir
- Few of us ever “are” where we are: Instead of experiencing the reality of the moment or a day, our minds and souls are elsewhere—obsessing on the past or the future, fretting and fantasizing about other situations. At home, this is one way of dealing with day-to-day doldrums; in the road, it’s a sure way to miss out on the very experiences that stand to teach you something
- "Seeing" as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you
- The purest way to see a culture is simply to accept and experience it as it is now
- Marijuana replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones
- “I never took drugs because I am drugs” - Salvador Dali
- “Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your foods, your closet full of your clothes, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware and f who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating” - Michael Crichton
- The journey itself is far more important than any destination
- Striking the right balance between finding yourself and losing yourself on the road requires creativity
- “Powerful men do not necessarily make the most eminent travelers; it is rather those who take the most interest in their work that succeed the best; as a huntsman says, ‘It is the most that gives speed to the hound.’” - Francis Galton
- Routines make your day more efficient
- You should be careful not to let your days or destinations blur together. Mix it up a bit
- “Listen: we are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” - Kurt Vonnegut
- “People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle.” - Paul Auster
- Be patient in finding your volunteer work, and be humble in doing your volunteer work
- “One must not delude oneself that we are all alike or destined to be members of some sort of global family.” - Jeffrey Tayler
- Always challenge yourself to try new things and keep learning
- “People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” - Joseph Campbell
- Never reduce the spiritual realm to the narrow borders of your own perceptions, prejudices, and ideals
- “We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can. Everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
- “Ecstasy originally meant to be or stand outside oneself; a removal to elsewhere. That’s what travel is both physically and philosophically. When I left Florida to go to Asia, I didn’t just leave a geographical location. I also left the surroundings, routines, and people that informed me who I was. Scary, but surprisingly freeing” - Derek Orth
- “Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” - Annie Dillard
- Telling the story is not nearly as important as living the story
- If travel truly is in the journey and not the destination, if travel really is an attitude of awareness and openness to new things, then any moment can be considered travel
- Rediscover your work, and do it well. Redeploy your simplicity, and make it pay out in free time. Emulate the best of people who themselves were at home when you met them on your travels. Integrate the deliberate pace and fresh perspective that made your travel experience so vivid, and allow for unstructured time in your day-to-day home schedule. Explore your hometown as if it were a foreign land, and take an interest in your neighbors as if they were exotic tribesmen. Keep things real, and keep on learning. Be creative, and get into adventures. Earn your freedom all over again and don’t set limits. Keep things simple, and let your spirit grow