As I approach the end of another exhilarating, expanding, globe-roaming 12 months, I have been scrolling through my photos, reliving my adventures. What a year!

My 2025 wanderings began in February, when I explored the marvels — ancient and modern — of Chiapas in southern Mexico. In March and April, I savored the blossoming of the cherry trees — and the buoyant unfurlings of the people admiring them — in Kyoto and Shikoku, Japan. In May I led the first GeoEx trip to the multilayered ruins, mountain villages, and off-the-tourist-track treasures of the Peloponnesus, Delos, and Crete in Greece.

In June, I was mesmerized by the Matterhorn and the flower-bedecked meadows of Switzerland and the dolce vita delights of Italy. In July I journeyed to France, where I fell in love all over again with Paris past and present, then made an exuberant recce to plumb the pleasures of Provence and the Côte d’Azur for a new GeoEx journey launching in 2027.

In September, I again reveled in the riches and revelations of unexplored Greece. And in October and November, I ventured back to Japan’s main island of Honshu to explore the hidden splendors of the Japan Sea coast, from the pottery of Hagi to the hot spring onsen of Kinosaki to the funaya fishermen’s houseboats of Ine.

As I’ve relived these adventures, I’ve been asking myself, as I do at the end of every year, “What did these journeys teach you?”

The four fundamental lessons I articulated at this time last year threaded through my travels again this year: the power of travel to revitalize a place; the sheer wonder of the spectrum our planet encompasses in landscape, belief, culture, cuisine, and everyday rite; the grounding and expanding importance of connection; and the truth that the vast riches of the world often emerge in the smallest, most intimate ways.

My explorations this year added three fundamental life-lessons to these.

The first lesson is best expressed in a Japanese expression that I love: Ichi go, ichi e.

This literally translates as “One time, one meeting.” More expansively, it can be translated as “Every encounter is a once-in-a-lifetime moment.”

This saying comes from the world of tea ceremony, where it reminds hosts and guests that every gathering—even if it seems ordinary—will never occur in exactly the same way again. Even if I served you tea yesterday and I’m planning to serve you tea again tomorrow, our tea encounter today is the only meeting that matters. Yesterday is gone; tomorrow is far away. All we have is this one moment together, right here, right now.

For the tea master, the deeper meaning is that every moment, every encounter, should be cherished, treated with respect and sincerity, and lived with full presence. Ichi go, ichi e.

I found myself thinking this over and over this year, in places I’d been numerous times and places I’d never been before: the pine needle-carpeted, candle-lit cathedral in Chamula, Mexico; the 300-year-old thatched roof farmhouse on a misty Shikoku mountainside; the musty medieval tanner’s workshop in rural Greece; the beautifully boisterous Moulin de la Galette restaurant in Montmartre; the ancient and ageless Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine in Shimane, Japan.

Whether it was my 50th visit or my first, in each place I thought: This is the only time that matters, so absorb everything here. Focus, focus. What do you see, hear, smell, touch, taste? What do you think? What do you feel? Embrace this moment and tuck it away. Ichi go, ichi e.

When I reflect on 2025 through this lens, I see the year as a heart-stirring string of meetings that encircled the globe: the mesmerizing Mexican archaeologist in Yaxchilan and the bold, bright Maya weavers in Zinacantán; the bashful bell maker in tiny Amfissa, whose crystalline creations grace goats, cows, and sheep throughout Greece and beyond; the impassioned miller in the mountains of Crete, insistent on producing her olive oil the old-fashioned way; the opera-singing waiter on the Île de la Cité and the story-spinning host at the Bar Hemingway; the 16th-generation pottery master in Hagi, the brilliant indigo dyer near the Japan Sea, the elfin soba sensei and folk singer in the Iya Valley.

So many treasured meetings! Such rich bonhomie! Ichi go, ichi e: We have this moment only.

I tried to express this lesson in my journal one blazing autumn day: We will never have this meeting again, so live it with all your heart and mind, with every ounce of your being. Respect and honor this moment, and it will reveal all its richness to you, and layer your life with meaning.

The second lesson my wanderings taught me was a corollary of the first: Life is long, and life is fleeting.

This truth was brought home to me with special profundity in France, Greece, and Japan. My roots in all three of these places go back more than four decades, and in each one this year, I felt the old me rise to live anew: scribbling in my journal at Le Petit Châtelet as I gazed in awe at Notre-Dame; losing myself among the monuments and mosaics on sacred Delos; surrendering to the riddle of rock and moss at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto.  

In each place, the decades of my moments there flowed back to me, so that I felt I was witnessing an archaeological excavation — or living a layered celebration — of my life, the where-is-my-path-leading young man of four decades before in easy conversation with the what-a-wild-and-wonderful-journey-it-has-been me of today, and both of them swapping stories with the many middle-aged me’s in between, each one exulting in all the others.

At the same time, the fleetingness of it all became clear too: The six-table sawdust Parisian restaurant where I used to have my weekly biftek-frites has become a minimalist chic boutique. The taverna where I spent a magical night on Delos, sleeping on the roof under the stars, is itself a ruin now. The cobbled Kyoto alleys where I used to wander in peaceful revery were a frenzy of elbows, iPhones, and selfies this spring.

I realized how things change over time, how quickly, inexorably, the years roll by: I’m not the carefree young man I was before; I don’t have unlimited horizons to explore.

And yet, and yet, when I lost myself to the slatted wooden walls and soft-lit shoji screens of Higashiyama at night, or trailed my fingers along Delos’s rocky walls in the setting sun’s grainy light, or ambled exalted at dusk under the plane trees by the Seine, the years fell away, and a voice whispered within: What wonders await around the next bend?

Like the cherry blossoms that burst into pink transcendence each spring, as the poet once said: In my end is my beginning.

The third lesson is simple: Wonders surround us.

I wrote about this lesson earlier this month when I described the week I spent with my son in Paris last summer, sharing with him the places that had changed my life and experiencing with him the riches of Paris now. In that column I wrote:

Sharing Paris with Jeremy gave me the opportunity to re-encounter the young man who had moved to Paris 50 years before and the city that had so enchanted him. At the same time, it gave me the opportunity to see the young-me-become-now-me absorbed in Jeremy’s eyes, heart, and mind, and to fall in love all over again with the new Paris, in 2025.

This was a gift inexpressibly greater than I had ever hoped for, and it soaringly heightened my sense of how precious travel is, how precious the world is, and how precious family members are. It made everything— everything — seem more precious.

This may seem overly sentimental, or naïve, or a bit absurd, but this lesson suffused my summer and fall: Everything is precious — every moment, every encounter, every step, laugh, and sigh. The key is to slow down, pay attention, and open our hearts and minds. When we do, we realize that wonders abound; outside and within, they’re all around.

That’s the compass to follow on life’s wanderlust way.

This lesson has taken new depth and meaning in the past few days. For our final journey of 2025, my wife and I have come to Santa Barbara to welcome the new year with our daughter, son-in-law, and two granddaughters — four-year-old Mia and brand-new, one-month-old Evie!

Celebrating here with family has brought this year’s truths resonantly alive: We have only this one meeting; life is long, and life is fleeting; the world bestows wonders wherever we may be — especially when they are shared with two little miracles named Mia and Evie!  

One of the most precious riches of the year has been the opportunity to share my wanderings and wonderings with you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading my words, and for sharing your thoughts with me.

And from all of us at GeoEx, thank you for sharing your curiosity and your passion with us this year, and offering us the cherished chance to create once-in-a-lifetime journeys for you.

Now, as the new year approaches, I’d like to raise a simple toast: Here’s to the precious moments of the year past, and the precious wonders of the year to come. May all your adventures, at home and on the road, be graced with health, and joy, and love.

Happy New Year!

Yours in abiding wanderlust,

Don George