2nd
Vagabonding - the act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time
“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. (…)
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. (…)
Vagabonding starts now. 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. 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.”
— Rolf Potts, travel writer, Vagabonding, Villard Books, 2002
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.
“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.
At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. (…)
Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.”
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, Pantheon, 2002
Rolf Potts: Time = wealth
His zeitgeist defining book is not just how to travel the world on a shoestring, but, more importantly, the mindset you need to take with you.
— Rolf Potts, a travel writer, his travel advice book Vagabonding, which has been translated into several foreign languages, is in its tenth printing. In 2010, he traveled around the world in six weeks with no luggage or bags of any kind, Time = wealth, Do Lectures
See also:
☞ Stefan Sagmeister, The power of time off, TED.com, July 2009
☞ Rolf Potts on Vagabonding, Authors@Google (video) , Aug 2007
☞ Pico Iyer, Why We Travel, World Hum, 27 Apr 2009
☞ MOVE (video) - 3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food, 2011
