The Vagabond's Way de Rolf Potts

Date de parution : 10.2022
Format : Relié
Nombre de pages : 416
Résumé : Thought-provoking reflections on the power of travel to transform our daily lives-from the iconoclastic travel writer, scholar, and author of Vagabonding For readers who dream of travel, yearn to get back out on the road, or want to enrich a journey they're currently on, The Vagabond's Way explores and celebrates the life-altering essence of travel. Each day of the year features a one-page meditation on an aspect of the journey, anchored by words of wisdom from a variety of thinkers-from Stoic philosopher Seneca and poet Maya Angelou to Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Grover from Sesame Street. Throughout the year, Rolf Potts embraces the ragged-edged, harder-to-quantify aspects of travel that inevitably change travelers' lives for the better, in unexpected ways. The book's various sections mirror the phases of a trip, including: • dreaming and planning the journey: "All life-affecting journeys-and the unexpected wonders they promise-become real the moment you decide they will happen." • embracing the rhythms of the journey: "The most poignant experiences on the road occur in those quiet moments when we recognize beauty in the ordinary." • finding richer travel experiences: "Developing an instinct to venture beyond the obvious on the road allows you to see places as mysteries to be investigated." • expanding your comfort zone: "No moment of instant gratification can compare to savoring an experience that has been earned by enduring the adversity that comes with it." The Vagabond's Way encourages you to sustain the mindset of a journey, even when you aren't able to travel, and affirms that travel is as much a way of being as it is an act of movement. Leseprobe January 1 AN INARTICULATE ACHE TO TRAVEL IS WORTH PAYING ATTENTION TO Homesickness is a feeling many know and suffer from; I, on the other hand, feel a pain less well known, and its name is “Outsickness.” When the snow melts, the stork arises, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest. —Hans Christian Andersen, in an 1856 letter Though the English word wanderlust—defined as “a strong desire to travel”—was borrowed from German in the early twentieth century, it actually has a slightly different connotation in its original tongue. The word lust implies “desire” in both languages, but while the German word wandern is often assumed to have a direct relation to the English word wander, its literal translation means “to hike.” A more descriptive German expression of the desire to travel is, in fact, fernweh, which combines fern, meaning “distant,” with weh, meaning “ache.” Fernweh is perhaps best apprehended as “farsickness,” a kind of antonym to homesickness, or heimweh. In this way, fernweh can be understood as a quieter and more personal urge than wanderlust—?a persistent longing to escape the confinement of the familiar and give oneself over to unseen places and experiences. Fernweh is the ache to widen one’s horizons, to be at home in the unfamiliar—to begin anew, and reinvent oneself in the context of the as-yet-unknown. While there is a certain vagueness to being homesick for the road—of longing to experience what you can’t quite describe, since it has yet to happen—a logical way to honor your feelings of fernweh is to quietly start planning a journey. In seeking to embrace unseen lands, you’ll allow yourself to embrace unseen parts of yourself. January 2 AN INTANGIBLE SENSE OF WONDER IS A GREAT REASON TO TRAVEL The best travel experiences are simple. They can’t be planned. It’s just a feeling of something genuine—knowing you’re lucky to be in exactly that place at exactly that instant. —Shannon Leone Fowler, “Kindness of Strangers” (2020) In the fifteenth century, an Arabic manuscript entitled The Book...