Rolf Potts - Vagabonding (2002)

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The goal of preparation then is not knowing exactly where you'll go but being confident nonetheless that you'll get there.

Rolf Potts
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.

Rolf Potts
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.

Rolf Potts
At times, the biggest challenge in embracing simplicity will be the vague feeling of isolation that comes with it, since private sacrifice doesn't garner much attention in the frenetic world of mass culture.

Rolf Potts
Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. Dig?

Rolf Potts
In reality long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics, age, ideology, income, and everything to do with personal outlook.

Rolf Potts
If you wander with open eyes and simple curiosity, you'll discover a much richer pleasure - the simple feeling of possibility that hums from every direction as you move from place to place.

Rolf Potts
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.

Rolf Potts
The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we're too poor to buy our freedom.

Rolf Potts
There is still an overwhelming social compulsion-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.

Rolf Potts
Contrary to popular stereotypes, seeking simplicity doesn't require that you become a monk, a subsistence forager, or a wild-eyed revolutionary. Nor does it mean that you must unconditionally avoid the role of consumer. Rather, simplicity merely requires a bit of personal sacrifice: an adjustment of your habits and routines within consumer society itself.

Rolf Potts
The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.

Rolf Potts
In a way, simplifying your life for vagabonding is easier than it sounds. This is because travel by its very nature demands simplicity. If you don't believe this, just go home and try stuffing everything you own into a backpack. This will never work, because no matter how meagerly you live at home, you can't match the scaled-down minimalism that travel requires.

Rolf Potts
Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from

Rolf Potts
For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead — out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need — we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts.

Rolf Potts
What better way to discover the unknown than to follow your instincts instead of your plans.

Rolf Potts
Indeed, the most vivid travel experiences usually find you by accident, and the qualities that will make you fall in love with a place are rarely the features that took you there.

Rolf Potts
The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.

Rolf Potts
The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.

Rolf Potts
Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.

Rolf Potts
Long-term travel doesn't require a massive bundle of cash; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.

Rolf Potts
Begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.

Rolf Potts