The Traveler

"I don't want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things."
Robert Pirsig Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance


In this modern, technological age, most of us find ourselves working faster and faster around the clock to keep up. But in Rolf Pott's amazing book Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, he encourages us to "slow down." Whether at home or abroad, we should always have the mindset of a traveler.

The traveler doesn't rely on routine, she sees and experiences everything as though for the first time. In this way, all of the senses come alive. The traveler goes about her day fully present - living in the moment.

Potts writes: "If travel truly is in the journey and not the destination, if travel really is an attitude of awareness and openness to new things, then any moment can be considered travel...Explore your hometown as if it were a foreign land, and take an interest in your neighbors as if they were exotic tribesmen."

For at least one day this week, make a point of slowing down! Think of yourself as a traveler even as you walk the streets of your neighborhood, sip coffee in your kitchen or surf the aisles of your local grocery store. Remember - with a shift in mindset, every day has the potential to be a new adventure.

According to Potts, the writer Herman Melville takes it even one step further. Melville writes about perhaps the most important kind of traveling of all - the kind that explores the inner country of one's own self: "'What does thou think then of seeing the world... Can't ye see the world where you stand?'"