Your Most Important New Year’s Resolution
It will come as no surprise to you, dear readers, that I believe your most important New Year’s resolution is to travel with one or more of your grandkids in the coming year!
Why is this the most important resolution?
First of all, life is short…and unpredictable. We never know how much time we, or our loved ones, have. So often we mean to do something important like plan a trip, but the tyranny of the urgent and the distractions of everyday life press in upon us. Soon, those important things we meant to do have somehow slipped away from us.
I learned this early on. After I graduated from college eons ago, I actually had a little bit of savings remaining. (Yes, that kind of thing was possible 40+ years ago). Unlike many of my friends, I didn’t find a job right away and wasn’t getting married. Without any of those ties, it occurred to me that this may be the best time of my life to travel, so I took the last of my savings and planned a month-long trip to Europe with my mother. (This was out of character for me, normally a very frugal person, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.)
We were the perfect traveling companions – similar in the ways that mattered in terms of travel style (Frommer’s Europe on $10 a Day, a 30-day Eurail Pass) and different but complementary in our roles. I was the detail person in charge of train schedules, currency exchange, etc. and she was the “people person” – she would talk to anyone, anywhere, and some of our best adventures were the result of her striking up conversations with strangers who became friends.
We had the time of our lives. There was no hint of a dark cloud on the horizon. The adventures and misadventures we experienced are stories I now share with my children and grandchildren. But less than a month after our return, I had those “ties” – a job and a fiancé (absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say!) and less than three years later, my mother, just shy of her 53rd birthday, was diagnosed with Younger-Onset Alzheimer’s.
That trip to Europe we took was the last fun thing we ever did together.
When we planned the trip, I expected we had decades of future adventures stretching out before us. Never did we expect anything like the diagnosis she received, which shattered our remaining years together.
Never.
A year after my husband and I married, we took a portion of the money we had saved for his graduate studies and took a Greyhound bus trip from the Midwest to the west coast. Why? Because my husband, who grew up in Pennsylvania, had never been west of Ohio. Having traveled widely with my family on summer road trips, I thought this was nothing short of scandalous! We stopped and visited older relatives in Oklahoma, Arizona and California, picking up fun stories and family pictures, while also hitting major bucket list spots such as the Grand Canyon and Highway 101 up the coast of California. (Beautiful scenery but a bit terrifying with my lead-footed husband driving a manual rental car!)
In the nearly 42 years of our marriage, we have never had an opportunity to re-visit those relatives (several of whom died within a year of our trip) or any of those spots. By autumn of that year, we were off to graduate school, poor students with our noses to the grindstone. Then the kids started arriving. Especially in terms of the family members, that trip was an unrepeatable opportunity we never regretted.
So what is the lesson I hold close to my heart? Do it now. Even if you have to scrimp and save and make some sacrifices, find a way to make that trip happen now, while you have a chance. Not to sound too morose, but you never now when it will be too late.
Secondly, there are the benefits of the travel itself. Those reasons have been covered in several of my earlier posts but to name a few: bonding and building family ties; making important, long-lasting memories; and expanding a child’s horizons.
All well and good, you might say, but why is this the MOST important resolution?
Quite simply, other important resolutions will likely flow from this one. If you want to keep up with your grandchildren on a trip, you’re going to need to be in shape. New diet? New commitment to exercise? You will likely find extra motivation to follow-through on these if you first make the decision to travel with one or more of your grandchildren. Want to read more, spend more time with family, get finances in order? They’re all related to that primary goal!
So, Happy New Year! Examine the year ahead to see if there are any milestones coming up – graduations, confirmations, significant birthdays. If there aren’t any, make up a reason! Make this new year a happy one for you – and your grandchildren – by resolving to take that special trip together.