‘Eat, Pray, Love' author Elizabeth Gilbert shares most interesting travel advice

Elizabeth Gilbert invited me to play a game, and I couldn’t wait to get started.

Giving the keynote speech to a crowd of over 1,600 attendees at the ASTA River Cruise Expo in Amsterdam this past March, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” didn’t spend her time highlighting bucket list favorites or must-see attractions.

Instead, she talked about anxiety. Specifically, what she calls “Purpose Anxiety”: the crushing weight of feeling like we must maximize every second, monetize our passions, and leave a world-changing legacy. For travelers, this often manifests as a frantic need to “do” a destination correctly.

The cure? A simple, radical shift from purpose to presence. To achieve this, Gilbert shared her favorite tool for navigating the world: The Most Interesting Path Game.

“You go out of your hotel or your ship if you’re staying shipboard, and you look to your left, look straight ahead, you look to your right, and you make - without your phone by the way - you make a conscientious decision in the moment of which path looks the most interesting,” Gilbert told the crowd. “The phone is good to have with you because it’ll get you back home. What you want is to get lost, like, that’s what you really, really want. What you’re doing is you’re asking your curiosity to be engaged with the presence of the moment. So, this is the important thing. Don’t go in the direction you think you should, that you have some sort of voice telling you should go. What you do is you’re just like, what catches your eye?”

Gilbert shared with the crowd that the opposite of anxiety isn’t relaxation - it’s curiosity. She said anxiety and curiosity live on opposite sides of a “toggle switch” in the brain. You cannot be truly anxious while you are genuinely curious.

“Purpose is always focused on an obsession with the future,” Gilbert told the crowd. “Nothing will bring more anxiety to your life than being focused on the future. If you want to suffer, get a future.”

To break that future-focused loop while traveling, Gilbert suggests dropping the “shoulds” - the museums you feel obligated to visit or the landmarks you’re “supposed” to see - and playing a game that forces you into the mystery of the present.

“I was recently in Germany and I and I was playing most interesting path, and I came out of my hotel room, and I was looking…and I saw that somebody had taken a whole bunch of potted plants outside of their house in Cologne - like the pots were red and orange and pink, so it’s a very conservative city, but somebody had decided to take all of these different colored pots, and they had all of these house plants outside. And it caught the corner of my eye. So, I went and looked at it. That’s the entirety of that story,” Gilbert said, as the crowd burst into laughter. “That’s how you play most interesting path. It’s, like, oh, that’s interesting, and you go and look at it. You can live your whole life this way. And you would have an incredible life.”

To illustrate the power of being present in the “weirdness” of travel, Gilbert shared a recent experience at a German spa. Finding herself in a “textile-free” (entirely naked) environment where she didn’t know the language or the rules, she was forced to simply watch and participate.

“I had no idea what was going on,” she laughed. “I was present to this giant, hairy German man rubbing ice on my body for some reason. Not what I expected to happen when I woke up, but I was there.”

This, she argues, is the true value of travel. It bumps us out of “past depression and future anxiety” and leads us into moments that cannot be planned or replicated.

If you feel “Purpose Anxiety” creeping in during your trip, Gilbert recommends this sensory countdown to lower your cortisol and heart rate instantly by identifying four things you can hear, three things you can feel physically, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste.

“Life is not a mystery to be solved,” Gilbert said. “It’s a mystery to be lived.”

So, get out there and live it people!

The Most Interesting Path game is a fun one, and Gilbert was right, Amsterdam is a fantastic city to play it in. I got lost in the city following the conference, and it was a joyful day.

I’ve played this get lost type game in the city before, the last time when I visited with my wife. This time, going solo provided some exciting moments that led to some great pictures, as well as a story or two that’s best told in person.

So, where will you play The Most Interesting Path game next?

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