A vagabond is a person who has no fixed address.

Hmm, sounds like myself.

Every year or two, I have to go through the painful and lengthy process of changing my address at all the social platforms, online subscriptions, bank records, government records, telephone records etc. to keep all of them informed that I am not dead yet and just happen to have a new address. There are two ways to look at vagabonding. First, that all of us are vagabonds. We have no fixed address ever, though we get the stuff intended for us when we reach our homes or check our mailboxes but we move all the time, changing our latitudes and longitudes all throughout the day, from one place to another, from one market to another, from one office to another, continuously. Secondly, that none of us are vagabonds. We have a fixed address when we look at the bigger picture. We reside on planet earth, a fixed place in a solar system which has a fixed place in a galaxy which has a fixed place in the universe, and it shall stay this way, atleast for a while.

So, now we have two perspectives on our hands. Either we are all vagabonds or none of us is. I believe being a vagabond is cool because we live on a very small scale of time that expands itself to billions of years when it comes to calculating the age of the existence or may be trillions of years if we include the time during the state of the non existent. Who knows for how long the tiny atom spun around itself before the big bang occurred? Take a guess.

If we acknowledge the fact that the universe is expanding, which means we have no current location on the map of universe, does it not prove the second fact totally wrong, that none of us is a vagabond? Fair enough. Let us drop the hook and agree that we are all vagabonds. Now, what does it mean to be a vagabond?

Everyone wants to get settled, sooner or later though. Everyone wants to have a place called home, a successful job or business, a stable marriage, couple of kids, good friends and peaceful everyday life. Most get it too. But, what happens later is actually the interesting part. Mind hates routine. It starts questioning the very basic foundation of what we call a stable life. When you have everything, the sense of exploration doesn’t die, it only grows stronger. You feel the urge to go out, to do something out of routine because routine begins to bore you. You want to go on an adventure, or at least think of it. Mere thinking about going on an adventure sparks a flame of excitement inside you. It is the thinking about doing something out of routine that gives birth to art, that ignites a passion and forces us to develop a talent that we might pursue in order to make our presence felt to the world. Recognition is secondary, it is the excitement of doing something unique that propels the idea of art. And, when you do art, you look at the world in a way nobody has ever seen it. By simply assuming that every human being on the planet is an artist, there happen to be about eight billion artists in the world today, and to me it means that there are about eight billion ways to look at a simple everyday situation. Now, multiply the total number of situations that exist in the everyday world by the total number of people in the world by the total number of days everyone lives and you will get a staggering number. It looks exactly similar to the numbers scientists use to measure vast distances between stars exploding in galaxies far away.

Scientists use mathematical equations to perform calculations that big, but I am no scientist. I can not conclude the number. I do not care about the number. I marvel at the everyday life I see around me. All sorts of people, who have no idea what they are doing with their lives, who have no idea about in which direction they are taking their lives forward, who think of themselves as the most important piece in the complex design of everyday life. The truth is that they do not matter. If they won’t do something that they need to do, someone else will take their place. There are people waiting for a chance to change their lives and there are people who won’t grab a chance even if it is served to them on a gold platter. I see wise men. I see fools. I see people with static lives. I see people with gifts and having no idea about how to use it. I see people living merely to fill and empty their stomachs. Even an animal seems to be in a deep thought every once in a while but for humans, life has become a ball game of collecting and spending numbers. What a pathetically designed society we are living in. The society of kings and slaves, the governments and directives, the rules and punishments, the news and secrets and none of it matters. People talk too much, think too less and never wonder. And you know what’s worse? They never get bored.

A vagabond will never rest, he can never rest. His mind will be a thought churning factory, where ideas explode like popcorn in a microwave. A vagabond can never remain static, he has to keep moving or he will cease to be a vagabond. He has to keep traveling, both outside and inside. Outside, to the farthest of places and inside to the deepest of thoughts. A vagabond has to keep pushing the limits of restlessness, he has to create new challenges, he has to express all his ideas, he has to set his thoughts free for those who are like him, for they will acknowledge his thoughts and add their unique perspectives to those thoughts.

If only we understand that vagabonding runs deep through all of us, we could all put end to our silly reasons to find a static in life and stop falling prey to boring and rusty routine. Once it starts, there is no end to vagabonding, it only grows and the more you vagabond, the more you will understand that even vagabonding is a routine that bores, but it is vagabonding and only vagabonding that takes you to the next level and makes you a mystic.

To be continued…