Living life as a vagabond: Long-term world traveler
If you wonder what is a vagabond lifestyle and how to practice it you are in the right place.
How vagabond travels the world and what it means to be a vagabond?
First, let’s see what is a vagabond and what it takes to become one.
What Is A Vagabond Lifestyle?
In the age of digital nomads and the growing popularity of travel blogs, you might wonder what is a Vagabond. This is a new term to describe people who are long-term world travelers.
Vagabonds are not dependent on any agencies or prepaid itineraries. They are free to choose their destinations, their routes, and things they want to do on the way.
“How is it even possible”, You might think. Who granted them such freedom? How come they don’t have to follow the rules established in our society and abide by the well-known route “home-work-home”?
Well, they granted themselves such freedom. Vagabonds made their choice to lead a less ordinary life, to live instead of existing from salary to salary. It is so exciting, isn’t it?
You might think that vagabonds are the rich people, who can afford to quit their job for a year or two, or they might be backpackers asking for money from the wealthier tourists for their next travel. However, the vagabonds have nothing to do with those categories of people.
What Takes to be a Vagabond?
Vagabond 101, first and most important is the willingness to allow yourself to get rid of the golden cuffs.
You are already thinking about it, that is why you are here. Second with the information and stories that you will read and listen to in the Vagabond Lifestyles Blog will inspire you to build a map, a so call blueprint that is unique to you.
Don’t just jump on the first thing you see, rather keep a journal and divide that Journal into three sections;
Self-Reliance. This is about understanding yourself as a person. Exploring the things that make you tick.
Businesses, Jobs, or Careers. This is about the different models that will help you take control of your career, business, and personal finances.
Lifestyle. Here is where you will focus on all the external components of your life. Such as where to travel to, a list of tools and resources to have, etc.
Every time you read an article, or an interview, or see something that you like to attain, own, or have, you will go to your journal (could be digital as well) and you will write it down or copy and paste (I like to do both). Some people call this a “sectional bucket list.”
When you start doing this your mind starts to work, your head wheels start spinning, as you will learn that when you focus on a new lifestyle it will start manifesting in your life.
After you start crafting your journal then take time to refine what you want in your new lifestyle, also look for those areas of conflict.
For example, You want to have a home base, but You will like to travel 12 months out every year well it is not practical to pay two mortgages unless you want to. Going back to your journal and re-defining what you want to accomplish is essential.
Let’s explore each of these three areas a bit more
Some of the things that I will mention here you probably heard many times and may sound like a broken record but spare my preaching for a moment because this is very important for you to grasp.
Do we start by asking ourselves what is success in life? This term has been debated for centuries. I think we can agree that success, for the most part, is subjective.
Success is Happiness! In its most diluted form, success is our desire for peace in our lives. It’s that feeling of security. The pursuit of happiness is the basic drive that motivates us to achieve success.
Some people mistakenly perceive success to be the accumulation of money. This is Ego blinding you.
Lack of continued consciousness of the ego relegates us to be its slave and, as a result, we also become a slave of what it produces. How can anyone be happy with the fears constantly plaguing the mind? So, in reality, to be successful is to be free and happy!
The pursuit of happiness is a paradox, however, it is the pursuit that negates its experience. Happiness is not the by-product of all these conditions, it is the source!
People put their attention on the wrong things and that’s why happiness eludes them. If you are happy, the right person will find you, Money will find you, and the right job, career, or business will find you.
Happiness comes first, and you experience it by giving it away. It is already within you, waiting for the moment of experience.
From this point, we will deeply explore how other vagabonds experience life, relationships, wellness, doing what they love, personal finances, and more in their lives, so then we can take what we want and build and act upon our very own blueprints to achieve true
How to Become a Vagabond
Changing your mindset and embarking on an unknown path completely reinvents your life!
So, if you decide to check to vagabond and want to answer the question of what is a vagabond with your own experience, it is an excellent time to start preparing.
Remember to:
- Change your attitude to money and form the right mindset.
- Exercise your creativity. Visit new places and try doing new things.
- Keep the travel journey.
- Slow down. Schedules and to-do lists are for tourists. Vagabond does not need those.
- Don’t overdo your preparation. Do some research, but don’t spoil the beauty of unexpected which might happen during your journey.
- Find work in new places. This is a great chance to discover the local lifestyle and culture.
Here are 4 of the most important life lessons learned while traveling
1. Focus on the “now”
When the path ahead of us is unclear, it’s easy to question what we are doing with our lives. Western society teaches us that we should go to school and get on a career path.
But some of us want some time off in between school and careers. Yes, we all want great jobs where we feel good about the work we do, but some of us want to postpone, and in some cases escape the 9-5 lifestyle.
For those of us destined to walk down this path, others will inevitably ask questions:
- “So what exactly are you doing on this trip?”
- “What do you expect to do when you get back?”
- “Don’t you have a five-year plan?”
These are all questions that you do not need to have an answer to – remember that it’s OK to just travel for the sake of travel.
There is plenty of time in life to follow schedules and make five-year plans, but traveling is about taking a breather from high intensity, stressful society and relearning how to focus on the present. This teaches you to deal with life on a day-to-day basis.
2. Embrace the ordinary
Being open to possibility is the only thing that allows us to move forward. Often we find that the reality of travel is very different from our dreams.
Yet without those illusions about the traveling lifestyle, we may never have had the courage to hit the road in the first place.
Talk to anyone who has studied, traveled, or worked abroad and they will tell you about the difference between glamorous expectations and normal routines.
Traveling is about breaking out of our boundaries.
When we travel for extended periods we see that not everything is as exotic at first thought. Television ads in a foreign country may seem weird as long as we hear them in that foreign language, but as soon as we get a sense of the language, the ads seem as absurd as anything at home.
Long-term travel is not about constantly seeking the extraordinary, but coming to terms with the ordinary itself. It’s about learning to appreciate the simpler moments that everyday life offers.
3. Push your comfort levels
Traveling is about breaking out of our boundaries. No matter the length of time, be it one week or a whole year, just being in a new place forces us to push ourselves.
We are obliged to memorize a string of strange-sounding words just to order a simple coffee, master new public transportation systems, learn how to use unfamiliar toilets, and ask for directions by way of body language, pictures, and the common language of laughter.
In new places, we want to be able to handle the situation, and so we force ourselves to learn.
Returning home after a trip often seems boring compared to our recent experiences; because in a new place, we are constantly succeeding in conquering new situations.
Recreating that feeling is, therefore, a matter of finding situations that push us as human beings, be it with a job, seeking knowledge, or in our relationships.
4. Stay flexible
If travel teaches us anything at all, it’s that an itinerary can change at the drop of a hat. Buses break down, hurricanes roll in and travelers get sick.
Being a good traveler means always having a backup plan or being ready to think of one. My difficulty with the five-year plan was because I am always ready to do something different.
In our travels, we can never predict the future, and the same holds for our “regular” lives back at home. Staying flexible allows us to achieve what we truly believe in even if that means sailing off course.
It allows us to push our boundaries and move beyond what we, and others, think is possible.
Vagabond Living?
This is an adventurous and fun part. Most of us got the travel bug at an early age and it has a hold of you and isn’t letting go.
Most of us got sidetracked for many years trying to have what most people call a “normal” life, I am of course talking about…
- A good steady job (is this even real today?)
- A house ( of course it comes with a mortgage payment)
- A car ( more likely will come with payments as well)
- More stuff than you knew what to do with
- And of course credit card and other debt (because we realize that this way of living requires more money than we make)
Most people call that normal life the “American” dream, we just don’t realize that it comes with the list mentioned above. Once you are in it is when you realize that all that is crap that you don’t need.
Then we start thinking about how can we uncluttered our life and pursue a simpler and more fulfilling life.
The Mindset
This is perhaps the most important part to nail down before you begin your vagabond experience.
Things will go wrong, especially when you least suspect it. Be focused enough to have a sustainable plan, but flexible enough to steer through the grey clouds of unexpected obstacles during the vagabond experience.
Long-term traveling can be one of the most amazing experiences anyone can have. You just have to develop the right mindset and embrace the inevitable diversions along the way.
“As for the tourist-circuit, slowing your travels down will automatically lead you off the tourist trail. When you aren’t racing from ‘attraction’ to ‘attraction,’ you’ll quickly discover that the best experiences come from the diversions along the way.”
Rolf Potts
References: vagabondlifestyles.com asabbatical.com matadornetwork.com