Every year, my comfy chair grows more comfy

Should I be worried? And, would vagabonding help?

Vamos Chiapas … a collage from my recent trip

What’s the most difficult thing about reaching 78?

Finding new experiences that inspire awe and wonder.

New sights, sounds, feelings, friends, books, movies, and lessons … all thin and stretch out as the long tail of life extends beyond 70 … 80 … 90 … ?

The world continually offers us new … in heaping doses, some of which even come across screens I can experience from  my blue, comfy chair. However, to find the type of new that excites my senses, jiggles my thinking into new rivers, and makes me gasp with the icy reality of a plunge into a winter stream, means I have to get out of that comfy chair and go forth into the world.

18 days in Chiapas, the southern most state in Mexico and one of my favorite places, offered me endless new. I took over 1200 photos … and those were only the new visual experiences. There was so much more new during that time that I left in a state of almost sensory overload that I will be processing for a long time. The opening image is my first piece of art from that trip. Who knows what those other 1200 images want to become?

The trip was such a gift, I wanted more.

On a rather long, almost sleepless night returning home, I started contemplating giving myself a gap-year, a year of wandering, experiencing life, traveling when and where I wanted. It turns out that a good friend has also been accidentally gifted his own two months of “homelessness,” so we started talking about the idea of “vagabonding” … defined loosely as wandering about without a defined objective or a home base.

For us, vagabonding would be an inner journey and we hashed over synonyms such as tourist, hobo, traveler, mendicant, wanderer, nomad, gypsy, tramp, drifter, and decided that vagabonding carried the sense of traveling lightly, following whatever calls us, freedom to change directions, deliberately choosing to be far from home and the sometimes tyrannical “comfort zone.”

How might one “vagabond” on Substack?

As I wondered about my own vagabonding next year, I began to think about the idea of “vagabonding” on Substack. What might that mean? … some thoughts…

• Exploring diverse Substacks.

• Writing about topics off track from our normal posts … maybe even way off track.

• Deliberately writing in a different style or genre. Self help science fiction? Fantasy memoir? Creative non-fiction romance?

• Choosing a controversial topic and inviting an author with a different point of view to debate it.

But, what about that ever-welcoming cozy chair and the all too inviting comfort zone …how do you resist its enticing lure?

PS. Rolf Potts who wrote a book titled Vagabonding, says, “Vagabonding is an attitude — a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word.”