Vagabonding

John Muir used to express amazement at the well-heeled travelers who would visit Yosemite only to rush away after a few hours of sightseeing. He called these folks time-poor, people who were so obsessed with tending their material wealth and social standing that they couldn't spare the time to truly experience the splendor of California's Sierra Mountains.

Two monks of the Desert Fathers lived in the wastelands of Egypt seventeen hundred years ago. They shared an acute desire to see the world, but had made vows of contemplation and were not allowed to. They learned to mock their temptations by delegating their travel to the future. When the summertime came they said, "we will leave in the winter," and when the wintertime came they said, "we will leave in the summer." They did this for 50 years, never leaving the monastery or breaking their vows.

Lots of us root ourselves to a home or a career and use the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way we end up spending, as Thoreau put it, "the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it."

Work is an active part of your travel attitude. You have to earn your freedom. But you are laboring for more than just a vacation. A vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it.

"Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Tim Ferriss.

Stop adding new possessions. Jettison unnecessary dross.

I've realized I need to use my own money for this trip or I will be haunted by the stigma of freeloading off inheritance. I want to be able to say it was my own dime.

"My greatest skill has been to want little." Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

The slow, nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.

Pages 77-87: [monasterystays.com](https://monasterystays.com). Service to arrange stays in Italian monasteries.

Slow down. Move deliberately through the world. Spend a few days at a beachhead to relax and acclimate. Watch and listen to your environment. Don't strike off to hit all the sights or actualize all your travel fantasies from the get-go.

I just realized I will spend more time in Europe than America between now and New York.

Vagabonding revolves around the people you meet on the road, and the attitude you take into these encounters can make or break your entire travel experience.

Be open and humble to different cultures. Don't get too carried away with it though. Ethno-tourism: in seeking to become part of these more traditional cultures, modern travelers are trying to validate their sense of authenticity and rediscover their own lost connections.

A few hundred years ago, adventure travel involved brave expeditions into the terra incognita, the mysterious lands at the edge of the known world.

What is the adventure in traveling such great distances and achieving such daring acts if you choose your experience in advance and approach it with specific expectations? The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. Open yourself to unpredictability.

The traveler and the tourist. Travelers truly see their surroundings whereas tourists superficially look at attractions. Critics and travel writers have spent the last century turning that into a canon of aphorisms.

"The traveler sees what he sees," wrote G.K. Chesterton in the 1920s, "the tourist sees what he came to see."

"Tourists don't know where they've been," observed Paul Theroux in 1992, "travelers don't know where they're going."

"Travelers are those who leave their assumptions at home, and tourists are those who don't," wrote Pico Iyer in 2000.

Don't worry about whether you're a tourist or traveler. The secret to seeing your surroundings is to keep it real. Don't obsess on the past or future, fretting and fantasizing about other situations.

With escape in mind, vacationers tend to approach their holiday with a grim resolve, determined to make their experience live up to their expectations. On the vagabonding road, you prepare for the long haul knowing that the predictable and unpredictable, the pleasant and the unpleasant are not separate but part of the same ongoing reality.

Politics are naturally reductive. Having political beliefs isn't wrong, but clinging to your ideologies too fiercely means you'll miss the chance to learn from people who don't share your worldview. Consider alternative beliefs not as someone contradicting your worldview so much as giving you an opportunity to see theirs. Open-mindedness is a process of listening and considering.

Mourning the perceived reality of the past blinds you from seeing the current reality of the present. Page 167.

You can't make the social reward of travel live up to the personal discoveries.