My quick summary
- Be intentional about living. Get yourself out of the routine and habits frequently to view the world as it is, not how you want it to be.
Ratings
- Reading difficulty: slow for a few sections, but overall easy to read
- Recommendation: should read if you ever thought about the difference between being a traveler vs a tourist
My notes
- Live deliberately every day
- Anyone can go “vagabonding” anywhere they want, while travelling, their hometown, or where they currently live
“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.”
- To live deliberately, make your work serve you by only spending what you need, and saving everything else in order to get you on your journey
- To “find yourself”, you strip away everything that distracts you from your mind, and sit there by yourself in the present and think for yourself, and only for yourself
- When you travel for long periods of time, it’s easier to “find yourself” because you are outside your comfortable environment, and once you leave, there are very little obligations to anyone else, except for yourself
- When traveling, disconnect from your social media, leave minimal forms of communication open for friends and family to contact you in case of emergency, and live your life as if only for you
“Life is a journey”
Highlights
- In reality, long -term travel has nothing to do with demographics - age, ideology, income - and everything to do with personal outlook.
- This deliberate way of walking through the world has always been intrinsic to the time-honored, quietly available travel tradition known as “vagabonding”.
- 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.
- Ultimately, then, the first step of vagabonding is simply a matter of making work serve your interests, instead of the other way around
- In reality, travel is not a social contest, and vagabonding has never represented a caste on the tourist/traveler hierarchy. Depending upon circumstance, a sincere vagabonder could variously be called a traveler or a tourist, a pilgrim or a satyr, a victor or a victim, an individual seeker or a demographic trend.
- Instead of worrying about whether you’re a tourist or a traveler, the secret to “seeing” your surroundings on the road is simply to keep things real.
- Indeed, vagabonding is - at its best - a rediscovery of reality itself
- 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.
- In many ways, embracing reality is daunting - not because of its hazards but because of its complexities. Thus, the best way to confront reality is not with a set method of interpretation (which will allow you to recognize only patterns you already know) but with a sincere attitude of open-mindedness.
- Interestingly, one of the initial impediments to open-mindedness is not ignorance but ideology.
- What we know as personal travel, after all, is the historical legacy not of exploration or commerce but of pilgrimage - the nonpolitical, nonmaterial quest for private discovery and growth. Indeed, regardless of whether or not you consider your vagabonding journey to be “spiritual,” self-motivated travel has always been intertwined with the personal workings of the soul.
- Travel, after all, is a form of asceticism, which (to quote Kathleen Norris) “is a way of surrendering to reduced circumstances in a manner that enhances the whole person. It is a radical way of knowing exactly who, what, and where you are, in defiance of those powerful forces in society that aim to make us forget.”
- 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.
- Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you “find yourself,” it’s because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind - it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true Self.
- Indeed, if you travel long enough, you’ll find that your spiritual revelations are invariably grounded in the everyday.
- And, more often than not, the most singular experiences of travel come in not finding what you’d hope to discover.
- Before you being your travels, you might not see the spiritual significance of such seemingly mundane details. 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.
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Started: December 28, 2024 | Finished: January 1, 2025 | Time read: 195 min