there is still an overwhelming social compulsion-an insanity of consensus, if you will-to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.

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.

Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.

In a way, simplifying your life for vagabonding is easier than it sounds. This is because travel by its very nature demands simplicity. If you don't believe this, just go home and try stuffing everything you own into a backpack. This will never work, because no matter how meagerly you live at home, you can't match the scaled-down minimalism that travel requires.

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.

The goal of preparation then is not knowing exactly where you'll go but being confident nonetheless that you'll get there.

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.