As my time zone eeks toward the turning of the year this week, the world seems to be set to start 2009 off on a very bad foot. Russia is swaggering its natural gas monopoly around (again) and threatening to leave some Ukrainians very cold this winter. Charitable foundations are scrabbling to rescue themselves after losing money in the stock market (not to mention the Madoff scandal). And Israel and Palestine. Again. Enough said.

Single-handedly, none of us can bring peace to the Middle East or save average and poor world citizens from being dependent on volatile commodities for food, heating, transportation, and energy.

But as Perceptive Travelers we can bring our own added value(s) to the world’s economies — monetary, social, even spiritual. We can help make the world a smaller place by bringing understanding.

The world’s still pretty big, with plenty of people and peoples who don’t understand other cultures or traditions, and plenty of people who hate the ones they see.

This is the year to make a resolution that matters. Use your travels to bridge gaps and deepen both understanding and relationships. Write a book. Write an essay. Start a blog.

Share meals. If you’re home, cook a dish you learned to love on your travels. If you’re away, share a special tradition or holiday celebration from your home (I always loved cooking American Thanksgiving for friends when we lived overseas).

Learn to play a different style of music. Live in Kyoto? Learn soulful jazz. Live in Nebraska? Learn throat-singing. Read books about the culture and history of instruments and music while you’re learning. Share your passions with those around you. Pass books on.

Educate yourself. Argue in defense of justice and against hatred, but do it gently. Some of the most inspiring stories I’ve heard in the last few years is of Israeli and Palestinian students and kids working together to move beyond centuries — millenia, even — of distrust and antipathy.

Learn to love the world, if you don’t already. That’s the real goal of all this traveling, all this soaking up and cultural immersion, all this packing and repacking of backpacks and wearing out of walking shoes, all this planning of excursions and saving up of tickets. Love every bit, every speck, the tout who won’t you alone at midnight in Izba, the tired-looking babushka selling cucumbers out of a bucket in Moscow, the businessman in Tokyo who wants to set you up with a prostitute despite your state of happily-married-ness, and the grumpy widow who overcharges for greasy posole at the local hostel cafe.

Because when you come home (as you will eventually; even if you don’t go back to your country or your birthplace, some place will become home again) it is only by learning to love these people and the places they’ve lived in that you can learn to love the tedious, boring, provincial types you grew up with. And that’s where the real change starts.