Travel Resolutions for 2025

By Don George | January 24, 2025

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the trip that changed my life. Well, “trip” is probably not precisely the right word, for this was a 15-month-long adventure.

It began when I graduated from Princeton and moved to Paris to work for the summer as an intern at Kodak-Pathé. After three months in Paris, I moved on to Athens, where I lived and taught for nine months at Athens College. When the academic year ended, I ventured for the summer to Kenya and Tanzania, where the parents of two of my students generously organized a safari and then an impetuous ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro before my return to the US.

I returned profoundly changed, opened up in a way that I couldn’t possibly have imagined the day that I landed in Paris. And so this month, as I’ve been contemplating my resolutions for this new year of travel, I’ve been thinking about that young college graduate who set off into the unknown 50 years ago. I’ve been contemplating what his travel resolutions were and how those resolutions have transformed over time into the resolutions that I hold today.

For him, the world was a huge blank map, and his fundamental feeling was a roiling combination of exhilaration and fear. He didn’t know what was going to happen, whom he was going to meet, what difficulties he might have to endure, but he was incredibly excited. As he wrote in his journal: Anything is possible!

As that year unfurled, the possibilities expanded and expanded. He found his footing, made friends, began to understand unfamiliar customs and rituals better, learned the rudiments of the local languages — and the world opened up to him in the most miraculous ways.

That year planted the seeds of my life as a travel writer and editor. I’ve been traveling ever since.

What are the resolutions that have ripened over these 50 years?

Travel with respect, humility, and an open heart and mind

One of the resolutions I held from the very beginning was the notion that we shouldn’t impose our values on the places and people we meet, but rather should respect their values and try to understand them from their point of view. I learned quickly in Paris and Athens that judging the world through my American cultural lens just led to misunderstanding; I had to get out of my mindset and look at behaviors and beliefs through a local lens.

A corollary resolution was to travel with humility: Living with a French family that didn’t speak any English taught me that lesson very quickly.

Over time these resolutions blossomed into a fuller one that is fundamental to me still: that we should always travel with an open heart and an open mind.

Cultivate the fine art of vulnerability

Through the years this has become the base of a practice that I call cultivating the fine art of vulnerability. When I enter a place, I try to say, “Here I am. Do with me what you will! I’m here to understand you and appreciate you, to find out what makes you special. I’m here to fall in love!”

While this might seem foolish or emotionally risky, so far it has worked quite well! And it’s led me to the corollary understanding that whatever spirit you put into a place comes back to you a hundredfold. If you travel with openness, an eager curiosity, and appreciation, you will be greeted with openness, an eager curiosity, and appreciation.

Think globally, learn locally

Another resolution-feeling that I certainly had 50 years ago was how important it is to learn something about the place you’re visiting: a little language, culture, history, the essential dos and don’ts. My travels have taught me time and again how even a tiny key of knowledge can vividly unlock a place and its people.

Fifty years ago, my very rudimentary Greek flung open doorways in seaside villages and mountain hamlets. I would enter a village, say something very insubstantial in Greek – “Is there a taverna near here?” or “Where can I find a room for the night?” – and suddenly locals would be embracing me and pulling me toward their homes.

“Come in, come in!” they’d say. Then they would sit me down, serve baklava and thick coffee, ask me where I’d learned my Greek and why I had come to their village, and then the photo scrapbook would appear. “This is my cousin Demetrios. He’s a policeman in Detroit. Perhaps you know him?”

Get lost!

That early traveler stumbled into some resolution-epiphanies quite unintentionally: the value of getting lost, for example. I didn’t want to get lost that first summer in Paris; I was trying to meet my friends at that obscure cathedral, or to find that hidden art gallery a work colleague had told me about. But when I inevitably did lose my way, I discovered the transporting cemetery only locals knew about and the handmade puppet shop whose treasures I would never otherwise have found.

And so this has become a central resolution for me now: At least once on every trip, get lost! Leave the phone and the map in your hotel room and just wander. This wipes away all expectations and liberates you to keenly see and experience. The world becomes anew – and you become anew, too!

Embrace the original social media

This calls to mind another key resolution — engage with local residents! Ask questions and listen closely to their answers! This kind of engagement was “social media” 50 years ago, and in many ways this social media was more conducive to deep travel than the social media of today. So while the adventurer of five decades before would not recognize the term, he would wholeheartedly endorse my 2025 resolution to embrace the original social media in place of the 21st-century kind.

Build pathways of appreciation

This leads me to a favorite resolution that I’ve honed through the decades: Build pathways of appreciation. I love to choose a shop that specializes in something I love – pottery, let’s say – and then enter and ask the owner or manager to tell me about the pots she has so carefully collected and displayed in her store. Who are the artists? What do you call this style? How do they make them? They’re so beautiful, aren’t they?

These passion-paving-stones can lead to all manner of delightful serendipities. The potter is coming by tomorrow – would you like to meet him? There’s a potters’ festival this weekend in a nearby village and I’m going – would you like to come with me?

You don’t even need to speak the local language — because you’re both fluent in the language of Pottery.

Travel mindfully

One lesson that long-ago traveler did not explicitly think about but implicitly understood was the importance of traveling mindfully: being aware of the effect that you’re having on the local culture, economy, and environment. Reading Plato on the steps of the Parthenon, he could not have imagined that half a century later those very steps would be cordoned off and inaccessible, but he had already seen a pristine Aegean beach marred by trash left by inconsiderate travelers.

That recognition has ripened into a profound commitment to recognize and honor the two-way street of travel: the gifts that we take home and the gifts that we leave behind in the places we have visited. This idea has become more and more central to my understanding and celebration of the travel whole.

Travel slowly and attentively

One more intention-resolution that has been present from the very beginning was the goal of traveling slowly and attentively. From my first days in Paris, my goal was to find one wonderful thing and focus on that, to embrace it, absorb it, grok it so thoroughly that it became a part of me and I could carry it away within me.

While other visitors were rushing around Paris trying to tick off the Top Ten Places to See, I would spend a morning in the Musée d’Orsay staring at Monet’s “Les Coquelicots,” or I would plant myself in a pew in Notre-Dame and spend an entire afternoon there, trying to take it all in. The slower you look and the more keenly you live, the more you absorb and understand. This lesson has been reaffirmed every trip I take; by now the notion itself has become a part of me.

Ask “What have I learned?”

One last resolution for 2025 is to regularly pause and ask myself, “What have I learned here? What is this place teaching me?” This was one of the fundamental impulses behind my journal-writing 50 years ago – to try to make sense of my experience – and it remains a fundamental impulse today. Reflecting on this, I realize that this is really the fundamental impulse behind my whole career as a traveler and travel writer: to absorb and make sense of as much of the world as I can.

In this sense, I think now, maybe there isn’t such a big difference between that wide-eyed adventurer of 50 years ago and the wondering, wandering pilgrim of 2025. Less hair on top, to be sure; more stuffing in the middle. More exhilaration and less fear.

But as I peer out onto the landscape of 2025, the road still stretches to the horizon, radiant. And as I imagine the travels to come, I again take out my journal and write: Anything is possible!

Yours in abiding wanderlust,

Don George