Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

by Ken Ilgunas

Let the intrepid few have wild places where they might be stunned by the extraordinary, and let the sedentary many have such places, too.

I couldn’t stop the alarms from ringing in my head whenever I considered taking a gift. I didn’t think of a gift merely as a gift but as a debt with a bow wrapped around it. The exchange may seem harmless, but I knew my accountant within was always diligently at work, carefully recording in his ledger my gifts and loans and debts, none of which could be truly forgotten

Discomforts are only discomforting when they’re an unexpected inconvenience, an unusual annoyance, an unplanned-for irritant. Discomforts are only discomforting when we aren’t used to them. But when we deal with the same discomforts every day, they become expected and part of the routine, and we are no longer afflicted with them the way we were.