Vagabonding
Its the title of a book I picked up by Rolf Potts, and he defines it as leaving the ordered world to travel on the cheap for an extended period of time. It is pretty interesting so far, and I think I will enjoy the wisdom the author shares about traveling. I wanted to share witha quote from the book, which I think is especially relevant to our current sermon series at church. He says this:
“The more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom”
This is something I have been thinking a lot about in the last couple months, and since Paul’s comment about his friends slogan which was “Live simple, Live free.” I think as a culture, we enslave ourselves to our stuff. We buy things that we think we need, and then we have to pay money to maintain those things, and so we just end up enslaving ourselves more and more. We do this with no mater what we buy, houses, cars, motorcycles, iphones. The ironic thing is that the more we own, the more we enslave ourselves. I have been working hard to own less things, so that I can be more generous, and so that I can be more free. It is hard, even this computer I am typing on can be a hindrance. We think we can’t afford to buy our freedom, but financial freedom comes when we just stop buying more than we actually need.
What if we just bought what we needed, maybe even just what we needed to be comforable? I picture everyone living in airstream aluminum trailers, with crappy cars, and no yard, but maybe that is just cause I grew up in Victorville. But imagine what people could collectively do with all that money. On the selfish side of things, people could travel the whole world, whereve they wanted. And on the philanthropy side, we could make it so that everyone in the world has access to clean water.
I don’t think having things is bad, I just think it is sad that we are so enslaved to our stuff, and so caught up in the idea that money is all there is, that we believe we will never be able to buy our own freedom.
December 9th, 2008 at 9:48 am
I like your outlook. People really do become enslaved to their posessions. I am fascinated by the idea of not owning an item if it requires me to serve it instead of it serving my needs. I’m pretty sure this would eliminate a lot of stuff…..almost scary!