Vagabonding
A traveling attitude…
I read or maybe re-read Ralph Potts ‘Vagabonding last week. Tim Ferris gives it such high praise, like it’s one of the seminal works of the 20th century that I had to go through it to see what the fuss was about.
Honestly it’s a combination of traveler philosophy and new-agey travel guide. It’s a small book and an easy ready. It’s a bit of a travel adventure manifesto where you are encouraged to disengage from your life and go take an extended walk about.
It’s an easy and in some places thought-provoking read but I think the people who lionize it are influenced by their own travel experiences in such a way that the book looms large for them as a testament to that experience. Stand-alone and out of context it is just another travel book, penned by someone classically read who has walked to the edge of the world and seen the dragons.
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For most of us this “Vagabonding” is a barely imaginable concept. To walk away from your busy life and wander about for a few months or years, soaking up other places and other cultures seems an absurd prospect when you can’t even put your smart phone down for 5 minutes.
But it’s a good reminder that this is always an option. There is nothing really stopping you. Mr. Potts makes a big deal out of explaining that you really don’t need much money to survive extended travel if you do it in the vagabonding style.
This might be seen as a young and single person’s game. Indeed it would be hard for us ‘more established folk’ to walk away from our mortgages, our kids and our careers. There are certain times, or seasons of your life that lend themselves more to this type of travel adventure.
For the young, unattached and unfettered this is a natural option. The book talks about how you can spend 6 months or a year putting your affairs in order and scratching together enough scratch to have an extended adventure.
That makes sense. I wish all young people would spend some time in other cultures with other people. I had the great privilege of having a travel job early in my career that took me to the far pavilions. Even though I was working when I was traveling or maybe because I was working when I was traveling I got to soak up the local vibes.
Culture is the wrong word. When you say ‘culture’ you think art museums and temples. I walked through plenty of temples in my travels but that wasn’t where I learned the culture. The culture was at people’s homes and out on the street being lost looking for directions in a foreign language.
It’s the people and their context that give you the perspective. It’s the perspective of travel that broadens you and adds value to you, intrinsically. It’s not the stories – although those are great. It’s not the places – although those are great. It’s the people and the context.
One of the most interesting things for me in my travel life is meeting other people, strangers and other travelers. It’s easy to go to a place as a tourist and not even see it. You need to belly up to the bar, turn to the person next to you and ask ‘so, what do you do?’
The thing that Potts gets right in his book, and that most travelers know, is that travel is an attitude, not a place. It doesn’t matter if you’re at your local grocery or in a yurt in Timbuktu – it is your attitude that will allow you to be present in that place. That is the attitude of the traveler.
I can remember when I worked in Mexico some of the expatriots who came down from the states were saddened by the poverty. They couldn’t see beyond their own frame of reference. To them a corrugated metal shack without running water was suffering and plight.
Sure, there are drawbacks to being dirt-poor, but unhappiness and suffering may or may not be among them. I bet my co-workers could learn from a few days and nights with those families’ many simple joys.
A traveler casts aside their notions of privilege and is simply present in the moment and the place that they are. You are not in charge of fixing things. You are responsible to have the mind of a student, to be present, to listen and maybe to understand, a little, because you can never understand it all. But that’s ok.
That’s what makes travel fun. The sensory strangeness. The other-worldliness. The feeling of being untethered. And being ok with that. Letting that flow over and through you and change you and enrich you.
I remember the people who would fly into India and be so overwhelmed by the ferocity of human existence in Mumbai they would lock themselves in the hotel room and not come out until it was time to leave.
The smell. The noise. The dust and heat. The crippled beggar children leaning in your taxi window and asking for English copper pennies. The rich, sweaty crush of life and death. It was too much. Buffer overload. Unable to rationalize and process the circuit breaker pops and they shut down.
You can’t fit a traffic jam in Chennai into a Massachusetts frame of reference. It’s a mistake to try. What you can do is be present, without expectation, and breathe the spirit of the place. Recognize it and enjoy the movie without trying to fit it into your frame. Leave your frame of reference at home.
That’s what they mean when they say ‘travel broadens the mind’. They mean it will shatter your frame of reference. It has the power to toss your lifelong assumptions to the gutter. And that broadens the mind.
Approach travel and life with an empty mind and you will profit from it.
“What better way to discover the unknown than to follow your instincts instead of your plans.”
Bring an attitude of travel to your life. Break your frame of reference.
Get out and see the world. Meet the people and drink in the world.
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People are people. When you travel in this world you’ll soon discover that people are people. No matter where you are you will meet the same good, bad, interesting and mundane people.
We are a universal culture whether we like to acknowledge it or not. You have as much in common with the denizens of foreign lands as you do with your neighbors.
That’s another way that travel broadens the mind. Having traveled and supped with the humans on the other side of the planet you realize that our nationalism and racism and xenophobia are ridiculous constructs.
“Cling to fiercely to your ideologies and you’ll miss the subtle realities that politics can’t address.”
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There really is no reason you couldn’t drop everything and go on a long walkabout in the world. You could leave your job, take the kids and just go. It’s funny that when we meets these people out on the road we think “oh, how lucky they are, to be able to travel the world like that.” The only thing keeping any of us from doing so is he decision to do it.
There’s a hippy-esque bias that you have to sleep in tents and hitch-hike to get the benefits of travel. Staying in hotels and taking showers doesn’t make travel any less worthy unless you’re insulating yourself from the populace.
Travel is an attitude, not a means of conveyance.
Get out there and find your world. Have an adventure. Broaden your mind.