Vagabonding.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 160.

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 taking an extended time-out from our normal life-six weeks, four months, two years-to travel the world on your own terms.

Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s 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 has never been regulated by the fickle public definition of lifestyle. Rather, it has been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging to do otherwise.

Have a library of over one hundred travel books including all the classics and among the best is a simple book published over twenty years ago that is book about travel but also a book about living called Vagabonding by Rolf Potts which reminds us that we and nobody else must determine how we live.

Vagabonding is a book about living that choice.

Before it is too late.

Below are extracts (italicized) from the book as well as quotes mentioned in the book (bolded).

If you have built castles in in the air, your work need not be lost: that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. -Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

Your travels are not an escape from real life but a discovery of your real life.

Regardless of how long it takes to earn your freedom, remembering you are laboring for more than a vacation. A vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it.

Indeed, the freedom to go vagabonding has never been determined by income level; it’s found through simplicity- the conscious decision of how to use what income you have.

There is an insanity of consensus, if you will- to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.

Money is of course needed to survive but time is what you need to live.

Unfortunately, life at home cannot prepare you for how little you need on the road.

Travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply, with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance. -Pico Iyer, Why We Travel.

The discoveries that come with travel, of course, have been considered the purest form of education a person can acquire. “The world is a book” goes a saying attributed to Saint Augustine, “and those who do not travel read only one page”

A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving-Lao-Tzu, The Way of Life

You can read everything there is in the world about a place, but there is no substitute for smelling it-Bill Wolfer, Musician.

Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell bound realm-which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of the shell and enter a new world - Eknath Easwaran.

On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.

We see as we are. If you view the world as a predominantly hostile place, it will be. By this same logic, of course, a positive world view can lead to inspiring, human-centered experiences.

Adventure is not an experience that can be captured on television or sold like a commodity Real adventure is not something that can be itemized in glossy brochures or sport magazines. In fact, having an adventure is sometimes a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing environment-not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.

The secret of adventure, then is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.

Travel is often a matter of confronting our fear of the unfamiliar and the unsettling- Tim Cahill, Author.

Adventure is wherever you allow it to find you- and the first step of any exploration is to discover its potential within yourself.

Explore your own highest latitudes. Be a Columbus to the whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought. - Henry David Thoreau. Walden.

Thus, travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by simple elimination: Without all the rituals, routines and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you’re forced to look for meaning within yourself.

After all , a journey is a temporary diversion, and there would seem to be little reward in the “common miracles” it promises. That is, until you realize that life itself is a kind of journey.

Photography by William Neill

Rishad Tobaccowala helps grow companies, teams and leaders by helping them see, think and feel differently. Forty years of experience delivered through writing, speaking and advising in ways that are actionable and inspirational. For more about Rishad Tobaccowala click here.