When we were 15, she was the one reading Jack Kerouac in the lunch room and lamenting that she’d was born into the wrong decade. I have a friend who is turning forty this year. You take off on your first trip at twenty four and forty-five years later you’re still on the road, in your heart and mind as much as in the physical sense. “Someone asked me recently about when I was taking my next trip,” he mused, “It took me a minute to answer… I was confused… there’s a ‘next trip?’… it’s all one big trip to me, and I’m still on it!” He turns 70 this year and if you look up “vagabond” in the dictionary, you’ll find his photo next to the definition. But the changes that vagabonding works in a person’s outlook and underlying philosophy carry over into “daily life” upon their “return.” I was talking to my Dad about this recently. It’s time bought back by periods of dedicated work and frugal living. If there was one lesson that I wish could be downloaded to the heart and mind of every newbie traveler, this would be it: That it’s the decision to vagabond that changes everything, not the geographical diversity.įor most people, their actual “trip” is measured in months, or perhaps a couple of years at most. Rather, it’s the ongoing practice of looking and learning, of facing fears and altering habits, of cultivating a new fascination with people and places…” In this way, vagabonding is not merely a ritual of getting immunizations and packing suitcases. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. Thus, the questions of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.
Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. “Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so called certainties of the world. An excerpt from Chapter Two: Earn Your Freedom: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, by Rolf Potts
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