86Thousand400: Tools of Titans 4

Scott Belsky

- Sometimes you need to stop doing things you love in order to nurture the one thing that matters most

How to earn your freedom

- Dream destinations

- Explore many of them for 2 to 3 months at a time at own pace, unrushed and unworried. Dream come true. Reading it over and over again during my travels, I realised: Travel isn't just for changing what's outside, it's for reinventing what's inside

- Ultimately, this shotgun wedding of time and money has a way of keeping us in a holding pattern. 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. With this kind of mindset, it's no wonder so many American's think extended overseas travel is the exclusive realm of students, counterculture dropouts, and the idle rich

- In reality, long term travel has nothing to do with demographics - age, ideology, income - and everything to do with personal outlook. Long term travel isn't about a college student - it's about being a student of daily life. Long term travel isn't an act of rebellion against society - it's an act of common sense within society. 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.

- This deliberate way of walking through the world has always been intrinsic to a time-horned, quietly available travel tradition known as "vagabonding."

- Vagabonding involves taking an extended time-out from your normal life - 6 weeks, 4 months, 2 years - to travel the world on your open terms.

- But beyond travel, vagabonding is an outlook on life. Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase 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

- Vagabonding is not just a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life - a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And as much as anything, vagabonding is about time - our only real commodity - and how we choose to use it

- There's a story that comes from the tradition of the Desert Fathers, an order of Christian monks who lived in the wastelands of Egypt about 1700 years ago. In the tale a couple of monks named Theodore and Lucius shared the acute desire to go out and see the world. Since they'd made vows of contemplation, however, this was not something they were allowed to do. So, to satiate their wanderlust, Theodore and Lucius learned to "mock their temptations" by relegating their travels to the future. When the summertime came, they said to each other, "We will leave in the winter." When the winter came, they said, "We will leave in the summer." They went on like this for over 50 years, never once leaving the monastery or breaking their vows

- Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows - but we choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or career and using the future a s kind of phoney 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." We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place

- Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. 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.