Quotes from Rolf Potts

When we pack too well, we are telling the world that it isn't good enough on its own, that it makes us uncomfortable and scared. We don't know if we can depend on anything or anyone, and we've decided it's better not to take the chance. —Stefany Anne Goldberg, "You Can Take It with You" (2012)

However, a lot of media information—especially day-to-day news—should be approached with a healthy amount of skepticism. This is because so many media outlets (especially television, magazines, and the Internet) are more in the business of competing for your attention than giving you a balanced picture of the world.

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you're not in a hurry." —PAUL THEROUX, QUOTING TONY THE BEACHCOMBER, IN THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA    In this way, vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal—not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.

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 being 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.

Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts—so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.

This is not to say that holding political beliefs is wrong—it's just that politics are naturally reductive, and the world is infinitely complex. Cling too fiercely to your ideologies and you'll miss the subtle realities that politics can't address. You'll also miss the chance to learn from people who don't share your worldview. If

Powerful men do not necessarily make the most eminent travelers; it is rather those who take the most interest in their work that succeed the best; as a huntsman says, "It is the nose that gives speed to the hound.

Certain activities—sleeping, eating, reading, socializing, wandering—will become a fixture of each day. This is good and well (routines make your day more efficient, after all), but you should be careful not to let your days or destinations blur together. Once this begins to happen—once you feel yourself getting jaded to the long haul—it's time to mix your travels up a bit.

Nevertheless, it's important, even on a personal level, to not just look at things as we travel but to see things for what they are.

always challenge yourself to try new things and keep learning.

Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute," wrote Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. "Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup." By

Explore your own higher latitudes," wrote Thoreau in Walden. "Be a Columbus to whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

but words are symbols, and symbols never resonate the same for everyone.

Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences," wrote Bertrand Russell. "They say to themselves, for example, 'So this is what an earthquake is like,' and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.

It is not speech which we should want to know: we should want to know the speaker. It is not things seen which we should want to know: we should know the seer. It is not sounds which we should want to know: we should know the hearer. It is not the mind which we should want to know: WE SHOULD KNOW THE THINKER. —FROM THE KAUSHITAKI UPANISHAD

From all your herds, a cup or two of milk, From all your granaries, a loaf of bread, In all your palace, only half a bed: Can man use more? And do you own the rest? —ANCIENT SANSKRIT POEM

Rather, it is a warning to avoid turning inspiration into fetish and tradition into dogma; it is an admonition to never reduce the spiritual realm to the narrow borders of your own perceptions, prejudices, and ideals.

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.

vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.

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 need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment no matter what. —GEORGE SANTAYANA, "THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL

And they say in truth that a man is made of desire. As his desire is, so is his faith. As his faith is, so are his works. As his works are, so he becomes.

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.

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.