Tomorrow might belong to the dreamers, but today belongs to anyone willing to live in this moment. Why not do both? What a whirlwind these past few days have been for our family. We’ve celebrated birthdays, graduations, and an anniversary. This weekend my wife and I marked out 18th wedding anniversary with a quick trip away. It was an amazing time for a lot of reasons, but most of all it was a reminder that we’re still able to surprise one another.

When you’ve spent most of your life together with a person you can start to wonder if there’s anything new that you don’t know about them. We’ve been together since we were 18 years old, so technically at forty, we’ve spent more time together than a part. Our identities have even fused. People who have known us for a long time call us by our couple name, Sam and Sam. (It doesn’t help that we basically have the same name). And then, over the past 13 years we’ve acquired new identities as mommy and daddy. Anniversaries provide us with a bit of a step-back to reconnect outside of our day to day responsibilities and remember the individual we fell in love with.

That’s exactly what we did this weekend, and we did it with a fun game called… what’s something I don’t know about you? As it turned out for us, there were a few interesting new things we both learned. Sometimes simply creating the space for dialogue outside of your everyday routine opens you up to see your partner in a new light.

Another way to learn something new about your partner: dream together regularly. You’d be surprised how much you get to know someone through what they dream about. We’re both dreamers, that’s one of the many values that attracted us to one another. So when we share our dreams, both our intentional day dreams and the ones that speak to us in our subconscious at night, we get a little peak into what’s beneath the surface.

This exercise of sharing our dreams serves another more practical purpose for us as well, and that is translating those dreams into intentions and action. As a professional, that’s my jam, helping people and organizations figure out how to envision the future, and then make a plan to get there. In my personal relationships, including as a husband and father, I employ a similar set of strategies. I try to get my wife and our kids to dream out aloud, so that we can align as a family on who we want to be and what we want to do.

To close out our anniversary weekend my wife and I had our own dreaming session where we looked back on the dreams we’d experienced come true, and started looking ahead to what’s to come. Time has taught us not to look too far ahead, and not to expect everything (or really most things) to work out according to our plans. But, it’s the experience itself of dreaming together that has brought us closer. Here’s to both now and the future.

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