Finally, a rainy day and the opportunity to stay in jammies and talk. We usually start the day with a long walk, but today we decided to act like teenagers with the parents away. You can make of that what you will. All I will admit is that we had fun.
On advice of good friends, we now start the new year (admittedly a bit late) with a planning session to try to get our heads around the coming twelve months in terms of personal and business goals. We allow a minute or so for how we performed last year, and then spend most of the time on what is likely to come our way next. We’ve discovered that measuring past performance, for those of us already in our sixth decade, isn’t quite as important as expressing how we would like to be different in the future. It is an unusually satisfying experience. Because we are on holiday at the moment, we decided to break the planning for this year into a couple of sessions, so as not to kill the buzz. Today was just business and related trips. Boring but necessary. We finished before noon and moved on to a glass of bubbly and what we liked about each other. Also very rewarding.
There is something so precious about having a day, or even a part of a day, for doing not much more than staying acquainted. It doesn’t solve all the problems of two quite different individuals living together, but I recommend it as a pretty good way to stay in love. Now that I’ve said it, I realize that the term itself defies definition. For us, it means that we like each other’s company, we enjoy listening to one another talk, and we love the touch and affection that the previous two behaviors tend to produce. Next thing you know I will be sending you photos of cute kittens. This is so not like me.
A few days ago we were walking along the beach when I spied an older couple, probably in their early eighties, snuggled up together absorbing the late morning sun. They were snoozing, certainly not up to anything crazy, but they looked comfortable and happy. Maybe we can be like that when we grow up.
