I'll admit when I first picked this book up at the library, I assumed it would be the tale of a young guy hitting the open road and basically bumming around for a couple of years before getting serious about life. Maybe that's because of of the use of the term vagabond, which conjures up an image of a scruffy person of no fixed address - the human equivalent of "The Littlest Hobo." This book is much more than that.
I was quite impressed with
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Travel and have read it through a couple of times, trailing Ted around the house saying "listen to this" and "here, read this paragraph". The author, Rolf Potts, is (I believe) a writer and observer of life first and a long-term traveller second. In this book, he offers more than a how-to manual for budget travel (although it certainly would fulfill as that also). Really, he's setting forth his philosophy of life and how that relates to a dream many people share: the dream of extended travel.
Potts regards long-term travel not as an escape but as an adventure and a passion. He counters the argument that it's a self-indulgent, irresponsible way of life or a sign of immaturity and lack of direction. It's a choice of how you want to life your life and spend the only real commodity we have actually been given: time. He is not against work in any way. In fact, he spends quite a bit of the book discussing the relationship between work and travel. He views both work and travel as noble uses of one's time. To travel, you must work to "earn your freedom". But to contribute your best to your work, whatever that may be, you also have to keep learning and growing and exploring the world beyond your own little sphere. Here's an excerpt that articulates his philosophy better than I could summarize in my own words:
"Of all the outrageous throwaway lines one hears in movies, there is one that stands out for me. It doesn't come from a madcap comedy, an esoteric science-fiction flick, or a special-effects-laden action thriller. It comes from Oliver Stone's Wall Street, when the Charlie Sheen character — a promising big shot in the stock market — is telling his girlfriend about his dreams.
"I think if I can make a bundle of cash before I'm thirty and get out of this racket," he says, "I'll be able to ride my motorcycle across China."
When I first saw this scene on video a few years ago, I nearly fell out of my seat in astonishment. After all, Charlie Sheen or anyone else could work for eight months as a toilet cleaner and have enough money to ride a motorcycle across China. Even if they didn't yet have their own motorcycle, another couple months of scrubbing toilets would earn them enough to buy one when they got to China.
The thing is, most Americans probably wouldn't find this movie scene odd. For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead — out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need — we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory — a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.
Not long ago, I read that nearly a quarter of a million short-term monastery- and convent-based vacations had been booked and sold by tour agents in the year 2000. Spiritual enclaves from Greece to Tibet were turning into hot tourist draws, and travel pundits attributed this "solace boom" to the fact that "busy overachievers are seeking a simpler life."
What nobody bothered to point out, of course, is that purchasing a package vacation to find a simpler life is kind of like using a mirror to see what you look like when you aren't looking into the mirror. All that is really sold is the romantic notion of a simpler life, and — just as no amount of turning your head or flicking your eyes will allow you to unselfconsciously see yourself in the looking glass — no combination of one-week or ten-day vacations will truly take you away from the life you lead at home.
Ultimately, this shotgun wedding of time and money has a way of keeping us in a holding pattern. 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 we're too poor to buy our freedom. With this kind of mind-set, it's no wonder so many Americans think extended overseas travel is the exclusive realm of students, counterculture dropouts, and the idle rich.
In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics — age, ideology, income — and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn't about being a college student; it's about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn't an act of rebellion against society; it's an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn't require a massive "bundle of cash"; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.
This deliberate way of walking through the world has always been intrinsic to the time-honored, quietly available travel tradition known as "vagabonding."
Vagabonding involves taking an extended time-out from your normal life — six weeks, four months, two years — to travel the world on your own terms.
But beyond travel, vagabonding is an outlook on life. Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions. Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure. 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 not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life — a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time — our only real commodity — and how we choose to use it." (p. 3-6).
Inspirational and practical. I loved this book.
