Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
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(2) A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit. (3)
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Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure.
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Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.
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vagabonding is not merely a ritual of getting immunizations and packing suitcases. 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.
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to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.
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“A man is rich,” he wrote in Walden, “in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
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The reason vagabonding is so appealing is that it promises to show you the destinations and experiences you’ve dreamed about; but the reason vagabonding is so addictive is that, joyfully, you’ll never quite find what you dreamed.
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Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgement. The traveler was a student of what he sought. —PAUL FUSSELL, ABROAD
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Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
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The implication here is that adventure is still considered a purely physical act—a ritual of putting rugged distance between oneself and one’s home.
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There’s nothing inherently wrong with extreme sports and organized expeditions, of course, but real adventure is not something that can be itemized in glossy brochures or sports magazines. In fact, having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment—not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.
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The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability.
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Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.
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Dare yourself to do simple things you normally wouldn’t consider—whether this means exploring a random canyon, taking up an invitation to dine with a stranger, or just stopping all activity to experience a moment more fully.
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Bertrand Russell. “They say to themselves, for example, ‘So this is what an earthquake is like,’ and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.”
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What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such.”
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Adventure is stretching your boundaries. It is more of a process than a thing, and involves a certain amount of hardship, and is the travel rather than the end. Sometimes that involves going somewhere that most visitors do not go. Sometimes it is a particularly trying day where something good happens at the end. And then there is something about finding magical spots that make all the work worthwhile.
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The thing is, few of us ever “are” where we are: Instead of experiencing the reality of a moment or a day, our minds and souls are elsewhere—obsessing on the past or the future, fretting and fantasizing about other situations. At home, this is one way of dealing with day-to-day doldrums; on the road, it’s a sure way to miss out on the very experiences that stand to teach you something.
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you prepare for the long haul knowing that the predictable and the unpredictable, the pleasant and the unpleasant are not separate but part of the same ongoing reality.
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In this way, “seeing” as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.
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For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly;
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Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding on the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing, and moving on….And the best landscapes, apparently dense or featureless, hold surprises if they are studied patiently, in the kind of discomfort one can savor afterward. —PAUL THEROUX, TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
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You can, however, recover and discover parts of yourself—psychic and emotional parts you never knew existed—as you travel through the world. And, as you do this, you’ll also leave behind aspects of yourself—habits, prejudices, even pieces of your heart.
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Listen: we are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different! —KURT VONNEGUT, TIMEQUAKE
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“While wandering, you experience a mysteriously organic process,” observed Joseph Campbell. “It’s like a tree growing. It doesn’t know where it’s growing next. A branch may grow this way and then another way.
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We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. —PICO IYER, “WHY WE TRAVEL”
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“He who stays at home beside his hearth and is content with the information which he may acquire concerning his own region, cannot be on the same level as one who divides his life span between different lands, and spends his days journeying in search of precious and original knowledge.”
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Islam asserts that the sacred is never separate from the secular,
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To me, travel represents ecstasy. I don’t mean “ecstasy” as simply intense happiness or joy; it’s much more than that. Ecstasy, or ekstasis in Greek, originally meant “to be or stand outside oneself; a removal to elsewhere.” That’s what travel is both physically and philosophically.
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“What we know, at least for starters, is: here we—so incontrovertibly—are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see.
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away when you return home. If travel truly is in the journey and not the destination, if travel really is an attitude of awareness and openness to new things, then any moment can be considered travel.
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As you continue to read, learn, and think about the places you once visited, you’ll realize that your travels never fully end. Even in times of solitude at home, you’ll feel less like an isolated individual than part of a greater community of people and places, near and far, past and future.