“We shall not cease from exploring, and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” ~T.S. Eliot

I am becoming reacquainted with the power of goal setting lately. I used to teach how the power of our written intentions can change your life, and for many years kept regular lists of what I was working to create. Even a to-do list carries some of the power of mapping your life through goals. The act of naming and writing down our goals creates structural tension that seeks resolution and motivates us to live differently, moving us closer to what we intend, often without our bearing witness. Claiming a life direction has boldness and magic in it and many studies demonstrate the success factor that results from envisioning, describing and choosing our personal life directions.

This same process energizes relationships with equal intensity. Two people who have a shared language of intention and vision for their days together are literally on the same map. Once the two people agree on their life direction, when one strays s/he can be pulled back by the other. Their shared goals not only add legitimacy to their commitment, but acts like the rudder, righting the ship that they both identify as a shared journey.

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“Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.”- Anthony Robbins

The New Year began under the light of a blue moon, although I couldn’t see it as I drove down a dark freeway in the driving rain. I was trying to follow the lane markers when the car started to hydroplane. Then a light symbol showed up on my dash that was uncomfortably close to my warning lights. As I floated right looking for dryer road I was also checking my lights. Minutes later I look up to see flashing lights behind me.

My car clock struck midnight as the state trooper came to the window. After hearing about the hydroplaning and light problem, the officer took my license and asked for the insurance and registration, which I quickly learned was on my husband’s desk instead of in my glove compartment. The officer came back and told me I was ok to go. No ticket, ‘just be careful going home.’

Having a positive run-in with the law seems like a good portent to the New Year. Not only was I able to expand my idea of state troopers to include a helping aspect, but also I was able to reduce my fear of being seen by them. It was transformative and as I made my way through the pouring rain, I felt some mix of protection and luck lead me into the New Year.

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“Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment� only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for and then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow or a friend.’ -Naomi Shihab Nye

The Future feels like it is dissolving around me lately: dreams dissipating, relationships abruptly ending, and young people overcome by their possibilities, or lack of them, are taking their own lives. This is what my days have been full of. One has only to pick up his or her local paper to bear witness to the loss and struggle that characterizes the lives of so many. We are collectively awash in things lost and running as fast as we can to re-imagine a future, any future.

Loss and the stages of grief that accompany it are universal. Little by little, beneath the anger, denial and depression, our sorrow carves the unbelievable into our psyche, making the grooves in our brain expand to accommodate what our hearts cannot hold. This is the truth of deep sorrow; it changes us bodily if we allow it. Refusing is no good; although it is unfortunate no prizes are ever awarded for the mighty efforts made to resist our own pain. The resistance becomes its own storyline, which the Tibetans call ‘shenpa.’ This is the places where loss hooks us, and rather than actually experience the depth of our sorrow and pain, we devolve.

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‘Remember that the truth is in the details�Of course the devil’s there, too–everyone says so–but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing.’ -Stephen King

I have never been a detail-oriented person. I have always preferred big picture thinking and have enjoyed relishing visions of possibility without really grasping the zillions of details that would take me there. My husband continues to remind me that it is easy to have another great idea, but painful if you refuse to account for the tiny steps that make up the path to your dreams. I have been mostly cured of my wreck less creative dreaming by the daily work of raising our four children and the processes and procedures that build a business, brick by brick. In the process I have learned to embrace the details as the dream because ultimately they are inseparable.

Life is nothing if not the details of time and place that identify the work and relationships that define our existence. We reveal ourselves most honestly and intimately in the smallest of interactions and the tiny incidents of daily routines. When we ignore and become impatient with the details of our life we betray the dreams that created them in the first place. Learning to embrace the details of life and give ourselves to them with the same intentions we held for the dreams that they came from is what transforms our ordinary life to the extraordinary.

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‘To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.’ Emily Dickinson

If life on earth can be reduced to anything, it is the time we are given to inhabit it. Time is the one resource that is doled out to all of us equally and yet what we do with the hours of our lives determines not only the quality of our daily existence, but whether in the end, we have left behind anything that makes life more beautiful, more bearable, more true for those who remember us. Yet, time is also an elusive resource. Everything takes longer than we think, except for life itself, which the deeper you get into it, the faster it seems to go by. I recognize this in my own life by the way a new season still catches me off guard, letting go of summer takes me clear to the end of October. Every time I unpack the holiday ornaments, I am dumb founded by the spin of another year gone by.

Celebrating my silver anniversary this spring is yet another poignant reminder of the time of our lives. I can’t even believe that I am old enough to have a silver anniversary, let alone take stock of the thousands of days that I have spent alongside another person, who, even after all this time, remains a mystery. Mark Twain once said ‘Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.’ Still, even after all this time, I am not sure I would claim to know a perfect love, just one that I can keep turning to.

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Here’s the thing to know about love, sometimes it feels great, like a sunny day in the Northwest after 26 days of rain, but sometimes it feels like the early stages of flu- unsettled, achy, loss of appetite. Ok, well maybe not as bad as the flu, but love lives can be irritating, like an insect bite that keeps itching. This is good to know about love because it allows you to have reasonable expectations, that love will not fix you or your life- it will keep you interested in life and if it is good, keep you honest and trying to be yourself.

I bring all this up because it is Valentines Day, the day we set aside once a year to honor and express our love. This is a good time to assess what are reasonable expectations of such a holiday, it is a good time to recognize and acknowledge what you love about love and about your lover. It is also a good time to realize that even the best Valentine in the world cannot fill in the space of not communicating or appreciating in the day to day of life. So be reasonable.

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Making time for love is an important barometer of the commitment and sustainability of your relationship. When you consider the outrageous scheduling hoops we agree to without qualm in our work setting, or even more intensely in managing our children’s activity calendar, it makes you wonder how the idea of scheduling intimacy could still be so taboo.

Yet, taboo it is, with an overriding belief that sex and intimacy are somehow tainted if they are not spontaneous and immediate. This belief system is connected to the shame and guilt we carry around from our adolescence when we could only describe a make-out session if we could first say, “I don’t know how it happened, but suddenly we were just doing it!” We can only fully embrace our sexuality if it just happens to us. Planning for it forces us to claim the most unpredictable, and to some degree uncontrollable, part of our life.

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This holiday season I want to find a quiet connected space for myself and my family. I want the time to rest and breathe and wonder. I am sick to death of shopping for things to make me or someone I love happy. I want someone to look into my eyes and hear my confusion and sift through my feelings with me.

Lynn Jericho has been studying and writing about this search and has called it the Inner Christmas. This year she made a lovely little computer movie which actually brought my breath back and reminded me what I want to give and receive this holiday season. Here is the link http://www.theinnerchristmasmovie.com, you won’t be sorry you took the time.

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Here’s a New Year’s resolution that anyone can keep. Give the people you love, starting with yourself, the benefit of the doubt. Generally speaking and almost without exception most of us are doing the best that we can at any given moment. We are being as loving as we can be, as kind as we can be, as generous as we can be, even though our best might not make it, even and especially in our own eyes.

This was brought home to me in a deep and personal way as I spent the holidays with my original family. Although the visit did not include any storming out or other traumatic arguments that suggested the end of the relationship, the very lack of them and what was left over made the reality of the relationship clear. It was a bittersweet departure, with this realization of what was left between us, and our agreement to not try to be understood or provoke a healing in all the old wounds.

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Although I don’t remember the exact day that I pulled the one foot that I had out the door back into my marriage, Today, celebrating 24 years of marriage, I can’t remember the last time that it occurred to me that I would ever leave. It seems like I should remember when that change took place as it so profoundly changed the very fabric of what we were doing together, but like most things in life that are daily, we don’t see them as they are happening. They are clear as we look back.

We never had a fairy tale marriage, and in fact anyone who claims to have one is probably either not really present or honest. Our love for each other was uneven and the common issues of attraction and initiation- who wanted who, first and more, plagued our ability to connect for years. The classic, “I am not in the mood” or “I am tired” responses create a cycle of defensive and offensive reactions that is almost like a pre-patterned dance. It’s a scenario that many couples just don’t have enough language to find their way out of.

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