Vagabonding

PUBLICATIONS: OVERSEAS WORK

part of me wants to keep the notion of vagabonding partly rooted in nonsense: as indeterminate, slightly slippery, and open to interpretation as the travel experience itself.

Simple trips to the market or the toilet can turn into adventures; simple conversations can lead to charming friendships. Life

gallivanting

heightened spiritual awareness is the natural result of your choice to put the material world in its place and hit the road for an extended time. Where your treasure is, your heart will be also—and your decision to enrich your life with time and experience (instead of more “things”) will invariably pay spiritual dividends. Travel, after all, is a f

“Research your own experiences for the truth…. Absorb what is useful…. Add what is specifically your own…. The creating individual is more than any style or system.”

not only does simplicity save you money and buy you time; it also makes you more adventuresome, forces you into sincere contact with locals, and allows you the independence to follow your passions and curiosities down exciting new roads.

“Did you think you should enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you?”

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. —HENRY DAVID THOREA

Interestingly, one of the initial impediments to open-mindedness is not ignorance but ideology. This is especially true in America, where (particularly in “progressive” circles) we have politicized open-mindedness to the point that it isn’t so open-minded