There's a little Universal Traveler in all of us...

Back home, when I talk to people about my travels, the number one response I get is this:

"Gosh, that sounds amazing. I'm so jealous!!!"

It's a line that every long-term traveler is familiar with, one that's predictable, but also perplexing. It's perplexing because I know that I'm not some sort of travel superhero; I don't have super powers that enable me to be a jet-setter while others can only watch from the sidelines. I have talked to scores of people, with backgrounds similar to mine, who want to travel the world but have convinced themselves that they can't.

It's an attitude that's especially prevalent in America. Here there is simply no cultural precedent of everyday people taking time off to see the world. In New Zealand, it's practically expected that people will have an "OE" (overseas experience) of some type, but back in the States, we have relegated such travels to the realm of students, counterculture dropouts, and the idle rich. There is obviously some sort of a disconnect here.

My point is this: you CAN travel the world. No, really, you can.

I won't spend too much time trying to convince you of this, because there's someone else who can do it better and much more eloquently. That person is Rolf Potts, author of a short but compelling book called Vagabonding. This is a book that inspired me prior to and during my travels. It was good enough for me to read it several times. If you have even the slightest desire to travel the way I did, do yourself a big favor and pick up a copy of this book. It costs less than $10, and you can read it in an evening. Who knows...it may just send you down an exciting path that changes your life forever.

There is a passage from the book that I think encapsulates the overall message:

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 seventeen hundred 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 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 fifty 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 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." 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.

Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now.

If that doesn't at least get the gears in your head turning, you may be a lost cause. But if that passage resonated even the slightest bit with you, it might be time to start considering travel more seriously. Don't be afraid to think in uncommon ways simply because they're uncommon.