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

by Ken Ilgunas

All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of the other, and refuse to turn back until you’ve given everything you have. At the end of the summer, Paul and I drove

We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us.

Money, prestige, possessions, a home with two and a half bathrooms—these aren’t the guiding lights of the universe that show us our path. How

Stare—really stare—into the womb of creation, and it will be impossible to dedicate your life to mindless accumulation.

Life is simpler when we feel controlled. When we tell ourselves that we are controlled, we can shift the responsibility of freeing ourselves onto that which controls us. When we do that, we don’t have to bear the responsibility of our unhappiness or shoulder the burden of self-ownership. We don’t have to do anything. And nothing will ever change.

These, for the adventurous at heart, are no more than boxes—boxes too small and confining for souls made to fly.

Comfort and security, it seems, when overprescribed, can be poisons to the soul—an illness that no amount of love can cure, freedom being the only antidote.

Now that I’d been there and back, Niagara Falls, this place, this home, no longer felt like home. When I got a call from the Gates of the Arctic National Park telling me that I got the job, I knew I was really going home.

“He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

Sometimes it’s not until you see your shackles that you see your dreams.

The soul must first be caged before it can be set free.

Must we measure our success by the size of our homes and salaries? What if we got healthier, lived more sustainably, and became more self-reliant, albeit in tighter dwellings and in smaller families? Isn’t that success, too? I thought about my mom’s

The university today is not a place where we go to question the dominant institutions; it is a place where we learn to support them.

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. We forget to think about them like the daily disturbances of going to the bathroom, or brushing our teeth, or listening to noisy street traffic. Give your body the chance to harden, your blood to thicken, and your skin to toughen, and you’ll find that the human body carries with it a weightless wardrobe. When we’re hardy in mind and body, we can select from an array of outfits to comfortably bear most any climate.

We need so little to be happy. Happiness does not come from things. Happiness comes from living a full and exciting life.

Rather, I’d wear my poverty as a badge of honor, as a symbol of my unwillingness to dance to the direction of some corporate puppeteer.

These are society’s definitions of poverty and wealth: To be poor is to have less and to be rich is to have more. Under these definitions, we are always poor, always covetous, always dissatisfied, no matter the size of our salary, or how comfortable we are, or if our needs are in fact fulfilled.

Give me a full life over a long one.

That’s because it was in those moments, when I was pushed to my limits, that I was afforded a glimpse of my true nature.

“The trouble with Eichmann,” the Arendt quote read, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, [but] that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

Freedom, though, is an honest pair of eyes, a healthy physique, a cheerful laugh. Style goes out of style. Freedom is forever.

learned that I must appreciate what little I have instead of restlessly longing for what I did not.

knew I’d be okay if I listened to the oft-unheard voice within—that wild man who whispers into your ear when you most need it and least expect it: “Go for it.”