. . . Give your heart to the adventure! (edited)

The keynote address at this year's WWME Region 6 & 7 Convention was given by Karen and Tim Hogan, a couple from Plymouth, MI, who work together in therapy, training seminars, and retreats to bring healing to marriages. Tim is a psychologist who also writes and speaks on human sexuality and marriage.

There were four key points that they gave us to consider which can help us give our hearts to the adventure that is our journey to heaven together. They related these to a mountain climbing experience that Tim had with their daughter on her graduation.

1. Choose a playful spirit.  This is the part that is largely attitude, but I am finding that the general reminder to give my heart to the adventure helps me to make this choice. Our attitude can be affected by many things, and we too often attribute it to the factors that are beyond us, ignoring the contribution that our own choices make to our frame of mind.
2. Avoid the ruts.  They're not talking about avoiding routine completely. Of course our daily lives are going to have a degree of repetition. But because of that, our brains become trained to respond to one another by rote instead of by choice. We need to interrupt our habitual, automatic brain processes to keep from burying our partner under them.
3. Focus on what is right in front of you.  In mountain climbing and in life, if you focus your attention too much on the big picture, it can seem overwhelming. When you combine this with the habitual thinking, we can fail to focus on the person we're in relationship with. We can miss the nonverbal cues which convey so much more than the words they might be using.  Particularly, we tend to overlook our partner's feelings of sadness when we ourselves are feeling anger or fear. But for me, the importance of this point is also related to the idea that the challenges of our lives and our marriage can seem overwhelming sometimes; when we focus on the part that's right in front of us, the next step that we have to take up the mountain, we will find the foothold we need and will be able to manage that one step that we need to take next.
4. Don't lose sight of the summit!  At first this seems contradictory to the last one, but it's really complementary. Sometimes we need to remember that we're headed somewhere that's worth going. Sometimes we need to make sure that our individual steps are mostly taking us in the right direction. Remembering where we're going both motivates us and keeps us on track.

The other big takeaway for this keynote session was from our dialogue. Our question was about what we could specifically do to nurture a spirit of adventure in our relationship, and both of us honed in on the issue of setting aside our separate interests for the sake of spending more time together. My bride hates the dialogue process; she judges the way she expresses herself, which interferes with her ability to appreciate as I do the simple fact of her sharing herself with me, making a sacrifice for me in order to share herself with me. Yet time and again, when we do it we are amazed at how, despite our differences of personality and interest, we really are of one heart in so many ways.