12 Labors of 12 Months a Vagabond (Part 2)
“Travel is not reward for working; it’s education for living."
- Anthony Bourdain
4. Taming the Boar of Boredom
There are few things I loathe more than pointless, despicable, life-wasting busy work.
So how did I find myself doing exactly that early in the voyage?
It all started after I moved in with Buddhist monks.
The temple was located in everything you’d expect from a comfortable English countryside: tightly-trimmed shrubs, well-marked woodland paths, strong brick houses. On top of that, the “temple” was actually inside an old manor–like, Bruce Wayne-level manor.
I scored a room in this castle in exchange for a bit of gardening labor (and later as the cook). My bed had a duvet that practically whispered, “Sleep well, my liege”. In the mornings, when the blades of grass sparkled with frost, I would sit in a big chair with an even bigger cup of coffee in front of a very big window, and gaze out across the rolling fields dotted with my sleeping royal sheep.
Sounds like a nice reset, right?
Right. For about two days.
After those days, a sudden and rather desperate urge bubbled up inside of me and told me to do something, anything, besides relaxing in this peaceful environment.
I pruned trees until my hands were sore. Read until I ran out of books. Walked until I was tired. Wrote until my already sore hand couldn’t. And when I looked at the clock, it would read 11:30 in the morning.
I thought I’d lost my mind, and in a way, my mind was lost; lost in the uncharted territory of what to do when no one is telling you what to do.
From a young age we are conditioned to produce. In school, produce answers. In work, results. In society, law-abiding actions. The ones who can do that consistently are rewarded.
Which is why, when a huge amount of freedom is suddenly added to this rather habitual and guided life, the deeply ingrained productivity system glitches out. It starts to search for ways to put order to the newfound chaos, even if those ways aren’t truly productive (busy work).
I remember spending an entire day collecting and carving walking sticks. No one asked me to. No one used them. I’m sure as soon as I left they were used for firewood.
The problem is not the production itself, but the fact that we (especially my fellow Americans) have an identity so entrenched in productivity that our tolerance to do the opposite has been robbed.
We are uncomfortable doing nothing, anxious without content to consume, and frail in the face of boredom.
“All of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal, one of the most influential French thinkers and philosophers, wrote that over 350 years ago.
Boredom mainly stems from a lack of stimulus. If we are uncomfortable without stimulus, then we will continually seek to be sedated by it. This makes us excessively fragile and easy to manipulate like a rat running tirelessly on a wheel going nowhere for the next lump of sugar.
Or like me in the Buddhist center, with a mind searching everywhere but the present moment for fulfillment.
That’s what the productivity mindset does. It tells you there is no purpose without production.
If I hadn’t set my intentions at the start of the journey, I likely would’ve left the manor. But avoiding challenges was the antithesis of my journey’s ethos.
An evolution was required before continuing on the road. The production mindset needed to be split from my identity.
So I sat in my castle of boredom. No music, podcasts, social media, books. I even viewed writing as an escape and limited it. The only activity I participated in was breathing meditations for 30 minutes per day.
This became the labor.
Figuring out not only how to survive in the stillness solitude, but how to enjoy it.
The Fortress of Solitude
After an ugly couple of weeks, this is what followed:
A surge of imagination
A clearer intuition
An easier connection to the present moment
Without being buried under tasks and suffocated by people’s thoughts (content), I found space to listen.
The more I listened, the more I learned.
Ideas and solutions came with ease. After I stopped struggling to “optimize” the experience, it became easier to embrace. I realized the moment I was currently in had just as much to teach me as any future moment, as long as I gave it my attention.
The more I learned, the more I wanted to listen.
In this self-rewarding cycle, solitude became enjoyable.
“All of humanity's problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
If learning to listen is the key to making Pascal’s room tolerable, then perhaps all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to listen.
5. Owning the Odyssey Within
activating: squirrel suit
There are those who throw caution to the wind. We call them risk-takers.
And there are those who toss caution, conformity, stability, and occasionally their own moral compass right out the window.
We call them the vagabonds, land pirates, road-rippers and rogues.
Intoxicated by the freedom of possibility, we sometimes act in ways that don’t align with our behavior at home.
Why?
Because we can.
And, when you can do something, you usually do (at first).
Take toddlers as an example. You warn them, “don’t touch this, don’t go over there,” and as soon as you leave the room they do both. They are mapping the edges of reality: what is possible, what is not.
These discovery stages largely occur during adolescent years and begin to decelerate once the boundaries are well-mapped (typically around mid-twenties).
There are, however, paradigm-shifting events that force us to reassess the guidelines we’ve come to accept: death, tragedies, psychedelics, and travel.
When you travel, you become a stranger amongst strangers, which is pretty close to a clean slate.
The question is, what will you do with it?
If you are the 20-year-old version of me on my inaugural odyssey to Europe, you will take that slate and shatter it over your knee with some, no, more than some, very dubious and rather feral decisions.
I was cutting the rug with some Swedish birds when one of them asked me for the time.
My clock read 5 AM.
That couldn’t be right. Say, what day of the week was it anyway?
My brain went into overdrive. Sunday? No, on Sunday there was a market, and at that market, I bought the shirt I’m wearing now. Shit. That means it’s Monday. I have class on Monday. The most excruciating, life-wicking class of the week: microeconomics with the Fat Fish.
This guy was notorious for three things: 100-slide presentations, ignoring the use of the top 4-5 buttons of his shirt, and delivering lectures from, not beside the board, but in front of it. That meant, if we students wanted to take notes, we had to decipher the letters hidden in the curves of his belly and in the overgrown forest of his chest hair.
I checked my watch again and managed some simple math that didn’t seem simple at the time: three hours until my battle with the Fat Fish.
This wasn’t ideal. Especially when the past three mornings, two of them being in different countries, all synchronized to the same ear-piercing, skull-splitting beat.
My mangled and aching body was falling apart. My clothes reeked of smoke, sweat, and shame.
The diet of cheap tequila and peanut M&Ms was threatening mutiny. Another night of this would surely cause irreversible damage.
A shortened lifespan? Organ failure? Lifelong regret?
Perhaps all three.
While these thoughts may have carried a shred of truth, they were totally uncool and supremely unfit for the disco. My Swedish cohorts were starting to notice.
It was time to cut and run.
Some well-meaning voice cautioned against my walk home: “you’re just asking for trouble,” was the phrasing I recalled. Yet, shelling out cab fare seemed like a waste of money, so the walk home began.
10 minutes later on a dimly lit Madrid side-street, I was looking down at my feet, astounded at how they moved without my command, when a slew of more feet suddenly appeared. Only, they weren’t moving. They were pointed right at me. When I lifted my blurry gaze, I came to the conclusion–all too slowly–that I had stumbled into the heart of a rather unfriendly looking assembly. Eight of them to be exact.
Faint memories were returning…
“To get to your apartment from here, you’ll have to cut through a gypsy controlled area. If you really want to walk right now, give yourself at least a couple blocks of cushion. Otherwise, you are just asking for trouble”.
I should’ve heeded the stranger’s advice. Shortcuts were always a bad idea.
With limited peanut M&Ms and even less cash, my usual bargaining chips couldn’t be relied on. There was no escape in sight. At least, no gentlemanly one.
That brutal Monday morning (made even worse by a merciless two-hour lecture) taught me where my boundary was the hard way.
Like a toddler, I had to touch the stove to learn it was hot.
The road separates you from your usual chain of accountability–friends, family, work–while giving you an extraordinary amount of liberty.
If you don’t have your moral compass calibrated, the siren call of endless possibilities might lead you astray. Many Level One vagabonds stumble into this fate, a fate I too took a dance with.
Failure is a better teacher than success.
I stopped abusing the privilege of freedom as soon as I realized that in the absence of any accountability system, there would be no one to blame for my shortcomings.
How could I point a finger at my family, boss, toxic friend, or circumstance, when I was alone with full control over every decision?
The choices were mine alone. If I made poor ones (decisions deviating from my journey toward full potential), I must take ownership over the outcome.
Ex. You can continue to disco into the early morning and walk home after, but if you end up having to defend yourself against a band of gypsies, you aren’t allowed to complain about it.
This realization is not the labor, but learning how to act in accordance with it.
Everyone embarks on the Odyssey Within.
The road’s isolation only serves to emphasize it.
“Men are so quick to blame the gods: they say
that we devise their misery.
But they themselves–in their depravity–design
grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns.”
- Homer (The Odyssey)
6. Discovering the Elixir of Health
Think of a backpacker as an athlete.
Their sport is adventure. Their reward is experience. The harder the experiences are to collect, the more they are worth. The best athletes will sacrifice just about anything to build a collection of these memories–the non-physical trophies of the game.
Backpackers, like all athletes, have rules to play by.
Rule number one:
The less money you spend during the game, the more time you get to play it.
This rule is responsible for the majority of misery and suffering on the road.
All of which is made worse once you realize it is self-induced.
For example, a backpacker will sooner decide to sleep on a bed scattered with hairs and yellow sweat stains from the last one or two users, amongst 15-20 other foul-smelling and likely conniving deviants, than spend an extra $15 for a private room.
Sleep, a pillar of health, will be sacrificed.
The same can be said for food.
“Hmm. Should we eat at this clean and healthy-looking establishment for $10? Or should we just go back to the street food stand that twisted our stomachs more than a Six Flags roller coaster after a morning of bottomless mimosas, but that was only $1.50?”.
It’s a no-brainer.
Consistency is the basis of health (normalized sleep, balanced diet, frequent exercise). It’s also the first thing to be sacrificed in this sport.
Which is why health can be so challenging to maintain on the road.
We are constantly drowning in new stimuli, gobbling up strange foods, zig-zagging between time zones, jeopardizing sleep for the slightest hint of an interesting night, and fueling all of this with a cocktail of inexhaustible curiosity and adrenaline.
This is all fine and well if you are traveling for less than a few months. Your body will probably survive. The goal, however, is not simply to survive the road, but thrive on it, and do so with a bit of gusto.
I was in Budapest at the baths one day, when I caught a glance of a lurking, ghoulish figure in the mirror. His pale skin was barely concealing a set of jabbing ribs. His elbows were thicker than his arm. His dark purplish eyes needed a slice of cucumber laid on top of them, pronto. His face, was it my face?
Wait, it might just be the lighting.
I flexed.
That seemed to make things worse.
Definitely not the lighting.
The road had taken its toll. It was time to find an elixir.
Something to save me from the withered and worn fate that plagues most long-term rogues. I never wanted to see my legs thin into skeletal sticks screaming under the weight of the bag on my back. This would not become my fate.
I needed an Elixir of Health.
A combination of ingredients that alchemists of old once knew. Something that could always fit in my rucksack and ideally be replenished in any foreign land.
The existence of such a thing is widely talked about in the sport. Every athlete wants an edge.
One head of the Hostel Hydra, the barefoot wanna-be hippie, is notorious for promoting this elixir. It will often be presented in the form of herbal tea, or perhaps a root of sorts, something based in natural medicine.
Whatever form it takes, don’t trust it.
It is merely the overstocked goods of a clever merchant who told our friend that, “the natives nearby eat this to prolong life”. If you don’t believe me, take a good look at this hippie as he shares the tainted potion amongst the other gullible heads of the Hydra.
Is he really that healthy himself? The corners of his eyes don’t look too white. Nor his teeth, the remaining ones that is. His skin seemed perfectly tanned, but upon closer inspection it reminds you of the drying leather you saw stretched out in the market today. As for his weight, you won’t read into it. Simply because there wouldn’t be much to read into.
No. This is not the elixir we are looking for.
Hippie touting snake oil elixir? Automatic Herculean headlock.
One night, while scouring the streets of Budapest for this elusive substance, I wandered far outside my normal scope when I suddenly crossed an alley. It was dimly lit and dirty as all other alleys in the world are, but there was a warm glow emitting from what looked like a shop window.
Similar to a moth near a candle, I drew near without a sense of caution. The window was fogged over. The door was signless. Little did I know, that hiding just beyond this glass was the sustenance I’d been seeking.
The allure was irresistible. Unsure if I was stepping into a grandma's abode or a clandestine "massage" establishment, I pushed open the door. A bell jingled above my head.
In the corner, a mammoth of a man, sporting a mammoth of a mustache, slowly rose to his feet. His piercing gaze unraveled me completely. It was as if he had already discerned the purpose of my visit. With movements that seemed far too graceful for a man of stature, he moved behind the counter, never sparing me another glance. A paper plate skated across the counter. A large crimson red sausage, a large mound of coarse mustard, and a smaller mound of horseradish greeted my gaze.
Evidently, I had arrived at the time of day when a butcher only has sausage left.
Balancing the plate and plastic utensils, I claimed one of the standing tables. I wasn’t hungry so I ate slowly and took in the shop's decor. There were no other guests. A portrait of an old lady hung crookedly next to a poster of a pig with dotted lines around the different cuts. On the other wall, there were a few dusty shelves stacked with jarred goods. Amidst pickled beets and sauerkraut, a gleaming stack of silver sardine cans caught my eye.
To this day, I don’t know why I grabbed them. Three cans. It was unusual and excessive, as sardines were not something I ate. When I went to pay the strong man with the black mustache, the same mysterious force guided my hand to a stack of chocolate bars by the cash register (this was a cash only establishment). One bar, bearing a simple label, stating it to be 85% dark chocolate, found its way into my tight grasp.
This was a rather odd takeaway order, particularly after a substantial meal, and I expected the butcher’s face to reflect as much.
Yet, when I dared to meet his gaze, a radiant smile, wide as the counter itself, bright as the sun on summer’s hottest day, as white as the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, greeted my eyes.
In that fleeting moment, I realized that I hadn't just stumbled upon a peculiar butcher's shop; I had crossed paths with a guardian of secrets. This man, with his mighty presence and mustachioed magnificence, was a sentinel of sustenance, a custodian of the Elixir of Health.
With an imperceptible nod, he acknowledged the end of my unspoken quest.
As I turned to leave, the echo of the tinkling bell seemed to carry a whispered promise: this alleyway encounter was more than a mere transaction. It was a communion of spirits—adventurer and guide—united by the string of fate.
Athena guided Hercules.
And the butcher guided me.
As I stepped back into the moonlight city, I carried not just a few cans of sardines and a slab of dark chocolate, but the clandestine wisdom to sustain health in the grueling sport of vagabonding.
***
A month later, I embarked on a 1,000 mile walk through the Balkans. With limited bag space and an insatiable appetite, this elixir of health became my go-to. It was easy to resupply at any gas station and packed well.
While practical, no snack will truly mend all of your health issues.
There’s another lever travelers can pull to sustain health, but understanding its limits is a labor in itself.
My favorite brand. Completely due to the salty sailor.
To be continued…
