When looking back is too hard

“Would you like to talk about 2024 before we sleep?” It was a gentle invitation from my husband over our teeth-brushing.  “Um, no thank you.”

There was awkward silence. He did not expect my resistance.

“How about this? I’m willing to set some intentions for 2025,” I offered.  “But I really don’t have it in me to look back.”

Photo Credit: Melanfolia, @melanfolia on Unsplash

Some years are like that.

There were some big wins in recent months. No doubt about it.  I have new and exciting work, growing clients, growing children, travels, many moments big and little to savor.

But this was also a year of heartache and struggle too. (I should include 2023, come to think of it.) Too much death, dying, and grief. Too much rumination.  Too much worry about things well out of my control. Relational reckonings I didn’t see coming until they were upon me. And adventures gone sideways. I didn’t break any bones though (my specialty) and there were no pandemics. So I do not mean to complain.

All I am saying is that I am happy to turn the page on 2024. I feel no need to look backward.

“Sure,” Iain said. “Let’s set intentions.”

Photo Credit: Zoriana Stakhniv @zorianast on Unsplash

We did.  Financial ones. Health ones. An intention to help our children flourish, not get in their way with our expectations and control.  Praying together.  And generally working on transforming our negative self-talk.  More on that in another post…  

But I could tell he was deflated by my down-on-2024 attitude. So I asked him if he wanted to take our new intentions and revise our old relationship vision.

If you know my work, then you know relationship visions are a cornerstone strategy I use for rekindling closeness between couples. They are positive, short, achievable, concrete intentions, listed out to reread together regularly.  We wrote one four years ago.  Ideally, couples should revisit their relationship vision for 10 minutes every week.  It’s a brain training trick to support new habits. 

Three Reasons All Couples Need a Vision

1) Sometimes couples need to negotiate a positive vision — and put it into practice as a way of coming together and interrupting distress and struggle.

2) Loving accountability to each other.

3) But the BIGGEST reason – if we aren’t intentional about our partnerships, they won’t be our own.  If we are not mindful in our relationships, we will default into the patterns given to us by parents, our five closest friends, our faith communities, and all the media we ingest.  I’d like my own marriage, thank you very much, not anyone else’s.  And that means setting a concrete vision. Vision = Freedom.

And now I confess: we had ignored my own couples advice. We hadn’t looked at our vision for over a year.

When we sat outside with our vision statement and cups of tea, I expected to discover how far we had strayed from our goals in the last year. I expected to see all the ways we had missed our mark and fallen shy of what we truly wanted for ourselves and each other.  After all, it had been months since we had a formal check-in with our intended future.

“Wait a minute,” he said as we unfolded our papers.  “Did you read this yet? Have you seen this list?”

How bad would it be?

“We are doing everything on this list,” he announced.  “And…we don’t even have to think about it anymore.”

He was right.  We were doing many things habitually I hadn’t even noticed.  We go to bed early. (I am a notorious night owl.) We listen to our bodies. (Iain is learning to rest and not push harder as a response to stress.) We show interest in the other person (surprising how many of us couples do NOT do this basic one). We dialogue when we are not connecting. We take family road trips and watch movies in one sitting.

There are twenty-nine intentions in all. We were on top of 90% of them. We haven’t walked the Pacific Crest Trail yet or taken a trip with no return date.  But those will come in their season.

Both of us were a little shocked and a little mystified.  How had such hard months given way to what we actually intended for ourselves when there were so many roadblocks?

It reminded me of my daughter playing piano when she was young.  Just six years old maybe? She would never practice.  And yet every week, she would turn up to her lessons and coast through the skills. Thinking back now, I see her life was filled with music – listening to songs, singing at church, radio in the car.  At the same time, she was strengthening fine motor skills while learning to write and molding playdough. It was an indirect kind of process.  But a process nonetheless.

From 2020-2023, we recited those words almost every week.  Even though…those were years in which we were falling short in many of our daily, weekly, and monthly intentions for our relationship.  But we recited the words anyway.  And we never beat ourselves up.  After all, it’s a vision to fulfill, not a list of rules to flog ourselves with.  We never read our list without grace.  But most importantly…we read it consistently.  

So when death and emotional struggle and difficult personal reinventions came along…and the paper with our visionary words fell to the wayside, we had already rewired our brains. It was already a part of us. It was an indirect process of living out our vision.

I thought it was a year of losses and roadblocks to becoming who we want to be together.  Turns out it was actually growth.

So cheers to having a vision and returning to it day after day even when you aren’t doing it well. Even when life beats you down a little and you forget you have a vision in the first place.

Maybe we have something to celebrate in 2024 after all.

Photo Credit: Ian Schneider @goian on Unsplash