This year our envelope group celebrated our ten year anniversary, which is a stunning feat considering it began as an accident that may or may not have been spurred on by a certain level of spirits in our bodies.
In anticipation of this awesome event, we’ve all been looking back on our past envelopes. There’s something eye opening about reading your intentions over the past decade. From an older vantage point, some of the things that consumed us, now seem so trivial. Maybe it’s aging that causes us to set our sights on more important things, or maybe we just desire to put more realistic and tangible goals rather than hard-to-measure vague goals like losing weight or stopping a dysfunctional action.
There was consensus in our group that we still have the intentions to rid ourselves of bad habits, but what got lost in those all-or-nothing goals is the fact that we do make progress every year. We just don’t practice acknowledging them. That’s what’s been so great about our Envelope tradition: we get the benefit of having each other around to remind us of our successes throughout the years, however small. From our vantage point now, we see that those seemingly insignificant successes add up to who we have become. And since we all entered intentions that improved ourselves in one way or another for the past ten years, I’d say that we’re all better human beings as a result of those tiny positive inroads we’ve made along the way.
We also agree that aging does helps. We’ve grown too tired to care about what others think. So some of the trivial stuff we can let go of because we now would rather have the energy for the bigger important things that touch our deeper selves. In the same sense, our expectations have changed. It’s interesting to look back and see how big our expectations were. Perhaps they were unrealistic, although at the time they were probably more about our big hopes and dreams.
Regardless, one thing is certain…our acceptance of where we’re are at any given time, has become most important. Because if we can’t accept where we are, how can we have realistic expectations of where we want to go? As Kirstin pointed out, perhaps the tone of our wishes have changed after ten years. We write them now without the heaviness of expectation and demand, but more with the appreciation and gratefulness that they, in some way, make us more present and accepting and better than we were.
As for our common experience with the Envelope tradition, Amy summed it up best:
“There’s something really important about the camaraderie of our envelope gang, and knowing that we’ll come together every year for a little introspection and a lot of ridiculousness. And as we get flung across the country, it’s nice that this little thread keeps bringing us back together.”
