We hadn’t spoken in several years and we had both grown up and traveled the world, and now here we were, at Tacos El Grullense in Redwood City, CA. Justin ordered his burrito, and turned back to me and said: “Lunch is on me, you can repay me in stories.”

By some odd chance Justin had come across a blog I used to keep to catalogue my hitch hiking adventures in South America, and he was thinking of doing something similar. He is 32 and he just retired and now he is going to travel and live an ascetic lifestyle. Naturally, Justin has faced some pushback from pragmatists and well-wishers in light of his announcement. It is difficult for most people to understand how or why a person would just up and leave and have no loosely defined goals or destinations. I became fairly acquainted with these sorts of reservations during the year that I spent traveling. You learn how to justify your wanderlust in accordance with the inquisitors view of things.

The one question though, which I had a difficult time answering, was how a person carrying a DSLR and heralding from the middle-upper class suburbs of San Francisco, could justify refusing to spend even a penny for weeks at a time. I would tell people that it was about pushing my limits—that it was about understanding what it felt like to depend completely on chance and good will and human kindness. With very few exceptions, I was rewarded abundantly for patiently sticking out the hunger. Waiting for 16 hours on the side of the road with corn fields for company, teaches you something about the beauty of idleness and a light breeze. Not eating, or eating only bread and cheese for several days, teaches you that you don’t need to eat much at all, and also that a good meal in the right company can be the most gratifying of human pleasures. For the most part I justified my needless penny-pinching on selfish grounds—I learned this or that about myself or my limits or the human condition. But I always sensed that this was an unsatisfactory answer, because poor people were still giving beyond their means to provide for me, and generally under semi-false pretenses.

And then, over the course of mine and Justin’s conversation, I realized something that made me feel a bit less selfish, and a bit more fruitful as a human being. I realized that my periods of maniacal frugality were responsible for many inspiring stories—and that these were the sorts of stories that made me hungry for adventure in the first place. I came to see that stories are a readily accepted and universal form of currency, and that I had paid my way.

I thought all the way back to a guy named Tomas who had told some of the best stories I have ever heard. I had just arrived in Eastern Europe and Tomas and I were coincidentally both being hosted by the same CouchSurfing couple, and I knew that I wanted to “travel” but I had not really defined the terms. I had set aside a year for self and world exploration, and the only thing I had settled on was that I wanted to be in another country. And then Tomas came crashing in with his fables and his unruly beard. He told tale of hitchhiking from the tip of South Africa up to Scandinavia over two years. He talked about nearly starving during a frigid Norwegian winter, about sleeping on park benches in the snow, about a sudden sway of fortune which landed him a job as the tennis pro at a country club, and afforded him a flat that overlooked the snowy park where he used to hide and sleep. He talked about living in huts in Malawi with local natives, and about harvesting strawberries all summer long on the bucolic farms of France. And after he had told several stories I said, “I want stories like that…I want to live like that.”

And all he told me was, “Tomorrow morning, go to the end of town and put your thumb up.” And the very next day and for the following year that is what I did—and I have been repaid for my imprudence with a great many stories.

For the most part Tomas had depended on chance and the hospitality of strangers to nourish and shelter him across the miles. At the time I could not decide whether he was uncommonly resourceful or a masterful freeloader. When I began to apply several of his practices to my own journey, I found myself going weeks at a time on less than a dollar, and came to believe that steadfast austerity was the only way to understand a foreign place. I justified tightfistedness by telling myself that the best stories, in every case, were made possible by a complete dependency on strangers. Such a philosophy is inherently selfish, as it leads to self-understanding at the expense of an impoverished stranger’s resources—but for some reason, in the moment, it was not very difficult to rationalize an invented sense of dependency. There was something karmic in my thinking. I always imagined, and still do, that I will pay the love forward generously over time. And besides, these strangers who fed and sheltered me for days and weeks, seemed to gain something ineffable in the exchange; they seemed genuinely eager and happy to provide for me. They were the guides, the pathfinders, the original settlers—they were happy to help.

But why were they so helpful and hospitable? Why shelter and feed a bearded, dusty-footed vagrant with nothing but a smile and a map, and without so much as the jangle of change in his pocket?

A long belated epiphany allowed me to finally see it. I came to understand that I had in fact paid them for their generosity and hospitality. I had paid them in stories. And as I thought about my own life and the influence that stories have had over it, my epiphany felt less like a guilt-panged justification, and more like a time-tested truth. A good story is as good as gold, and there is more demand than there is supply.

The people who took me in and fed me were not moved by obligation, but by that innate tug at the human spirit for vicarious experience. We are all seeking, consciously or otherwise, an envoy. Someone to tell us what it is like in an unknown world. It is why we read and it is why we value learning; it is why we dream and why we get drinks with old friends and center our conversations around what’s new. The truth is, stories have become an increasingly rare and valuable form of currency.

Tell me a story I will never forget turns out to be one of the most rewarding requests I’ve ever known. During the next long pause of a conversation with a new acquaintance, make the request: tell me a story I can’t forget. An intimacy and bond develops between the teller and listener of a story. For a moment, a story will take you away; and for perpetuity you have a better understanding of the storyteller’s character and context. A well told and honest story goes a very long ways. The people I love the most, and the people whom I feel I know the best, are the ones that tell stories. From stories we are able to learn who another person is and why they are that way, and we remember who we want to be. A good story gets the heart pounding. It fosters a hankering for an abundantly lived life, a life lived deep and sturdily. A life closely shaved, and broadly cut—a life driven into the corner and reduced to its lowest terms. Well told stories are testimony to the possibilities of life, and the impracticality of regret. We need storytellers and life livers, and we had better encourage them to tell their stories and go on making more of them. Life cannot be reduced to 140 characters, nor into a calculated and composed 1x1 picture—it can only be understood when we barter with, befriend, and become storytellers. A story can help us see and understand all that life can be, and all that life means.

And so, here is a story you may never forget: I met the aforementioned Tomas in October of 2010, we were in Bucharest, Romania and we were sleeping on the same floor of a cramped apartment. He had knocked on the door at three in the morning and I woke up, met him, and let him in; he cooked rice for himself, and before I could go back to sleep he told me ten of the most unbelievable stories I had ever heard. Then he told me to hitchhike, and make a storyteller of myself. When I woke up he was gone, he had left himself 18 hours to get from Bucharest to the coast of Greece, where he had been told he would find a friend of a friend of a friend who would take him to Brazil by boat. This in itself is another story. Before I went to sleep, I told him that he was out of his mind, that there wasn’t any chance of his making it to Greece tomorrow by thumb—there wasn’t enough time or luck in one day for that sort of thing. I don’t remember how he replied or if he replied at all, but I woke up alone in the apartment, and found myself wondering if he had ever even existed.

Four months later, I had abandoned plans to work at a school in Rwanda, and I was in Argentina hitchhiking full time. I had met an eccentric Frenchman at a cooperative farm who told me about a Rainbow Gathering in the remote rainforest at the edge of Southwestern Brazil. You could only hear about the gathering by word of mouth, he said. He told me that a bunch of hippies would erect a fully functional village 50km into the heart of the middle of nowhere, and that they would occupy it for thirty days before going back to doing whatever it is that hippies do on a day to day basis. I was intrigued and I went, and the long and short of it is that the village that they made was really way off into the willowwacks and it was the most bizarre and eclectic place you ever saw.

A group of thirteen dreadlocked persons and myself were dropped off on the edge of a one way road, after a thirty-five minute drive past the fringe of civilization, and once we were offboarded the girl beside me made an animal call into the echoic greenery of rainforest, and then she waited until she heard a legion of animal calls and the bellow of conch shells in the distance. We walked toward the noise, and every few minutes we called back and forth into the distance for direction, until thirty minutes later we were standing in the man made village. There was a circus, a healing tent, a center for rumor control and information, four kitchens, a million hammocks, a ten foot tepee—and a whole cast of characters. Everything was built out of felled wood or found materials. I spent four days at the Rainbow Gathering, and that is a story for another time—but finally, after the nakedness and mumbo jumbo and howling at the moon had worn me down, I departed early one morning. I packed all of my things and walked down and out and away from the village and in the general direction of the nearest road. There were upwards of forty different pathways leading out to civilization, and there were just as many ways to become lost. I had spend the greater portion of the prior few days wandering along pathways and exploring, and I was well aquainted with the labyrinthine nature of things.

It was seven o’clock or maybe earlier, and I was the only one awake in the colony. I had been walking for ten minutes when I took a sharp left turn and heard the thick rustle of vines just ahead of me, and before I could look up I had collided with another man. I looked briefly and then carefully into his face—he was cleanly shaved, but I recognized his eyes and his lips. It was Tomas. The revenant of my wanderlust, the instigator of my vagrancy. This was the man who had entered into my life for thirty minutes, changed everything, and skirted on southward and foreveraway to catch a boat on the other side of the world. Here he was. I braced his shoulders and shook him and said, “Tomas! Tomas! Do your remember me?” He was puzzled. “The flat in Romania last winter! You told me stories about Norway and Malawi—about hitchhiking!” An emasculating welling of the throat was coming on.

“Oh yes, yes. I remember! How are you? Mark?”

“Matt, Matt, it’s Matt. Tomas! You caught the boat!”

“Yes I caught the boat. Wow I remember now. You are here, the world is so small and strange!”

At this moment I felt that I owed as much to this man as to any other person I had ever known. I should have been in Africa, and here I was in South America among hippies, living radically and believing in strangers, and chasing whim and wind into wherever. I was living. All because of his stories.

“Tomas, I’m a hitch hiker now. I am here by total chance. You changed everything, I started hitchhiking the day after we met. I changed all of my plans. I have stories now.”

“I am sure you do, I am very happy for you. Wow, I cannot believe this coincidence.”

He was not so much shocked by my transformation, as he was by the randomness of chance. We hugged, and went each our own way before my bleary eyed gratitude could culminate and make things uncomfortable. I thought a lot about the happenstance over the following months. Tomas never would have known that he had changed a person’s life just by telling a few good stories.

He had changed my life, and I knew that he had, and I had always felt that he had—but it was not until I sat down three years later and chewed on a carnitas taco across from an old friend, that I realized the implications of storytellers and of Tomas. In an epiphanic instant, I recognized and found comfort in the fact that I had most likely been someone else’s Tomas out there on the road. The hosts and hospitable strangers had never asked me for money because they wanted something else. They wanted to believe that there was a world of possibility out there, that it was theirs for the taking—they wanted someone to tell them a story about it.