Vagabonding Book Club: Chapter 3: Simplicity

Simplicity

On a basic level there are three general methods to simplifying your life: stopping expansion, reigning in your routine and reducing clutter. The easiest part of this process is stopping expansion. This means that in anticipation of vagabonding, you don’t add any new possessions to your life, regardless of how tempting they might seem….

While you’re curbing the material expansion of your life, you should also take pains to rein in the unnecessary expenses of your weekly routine. Simply put, this means living more humbly (even if you aren’t humble) and investing the difference into your travel fund….

Perhaps the most challenging step in keeping things simple is reducing clutter– downsizing what you already own. As Thoreau observed, downsizing can be the most vital step in winning the freedom to change your life: “I have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all,” he wrote in Walden, “who have accumulated fross but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters.”

–Chapter Three-Rolf Potts

Chapter three of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel is all about cultivating simplicity.

As I re-read this chapter the theme that jumped out at me was that simplicity is the key to freedom. That quote from Walden, at the end, that sums it up just perfectly: the struggle that so many people have with their “stuff” being at odds with their dreams.

It sneaks up on us, doesn’t it? Little decisions, small accumulations, tiny concessions that we justify along the way. We trade our big dreams for glass beads that glitter in the sun. Among the awakenings that come with Vagabonding is that realization and the determination to, “stop that right now!”

Vagabonding is a mindset, a way of thinking; one of the manifestations of which, is travel. Simplicity is part of what makes that travel possible in the first place and easier once underway. Possessions, debt, financial addictions, these are all things that keep us from taking off and traveling in the first place. An emotional dependence on the stuff that we think we have to drag with us, or “gear up” with as we go are the things that suck the joy out of the experience of walking through the world.

This chapter challenged me, yet again, to focus on cultivating the things that really matter in this life: time, passion and relationships. Instead of getting mired in the “stuff” around me and within me that results in golden fetters.

How ‘bout you? What does chapter three’s call to simplicity awake in you?

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Category: Simplicity

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