If you follow me on social media, then you know that I’ve been in Vancouver with Jan—the love of my life and the hottest, hunkiest, smartest, most intriguing human I’ve ever met. July 1st marked 21 years since the day I first set eyes on Jan. And to this day, every time he walks through the door I get the same feeling I did that first day: I want to be with him.
It’s no accident that I still feel this way. He’s still amazing. But there’s something more driving it: I want to feel this way. I relish feeling this way.
So I practice.
The Vancouver trip was also planned as practice—for both Jan and me. We’re practicing our “why.” Our dream. The seemingly crazy (but increasingly probable) future life-state we’ve meticulously planned in bars, coffee shops, and rainy afternoons wrapped up in one another on the living room couch. Vancouver is our first official practice session for (drumroll, please…): THE ENDLESS SUMMER.
In September 2020, Christian will be off to college (God and the Cornish College of the Arts admissions board willing). And Jan and I will be in PrimeTime in an entirely new way. We’ll be alone again. Like we were for those first three years—more than 18 years ago—when we first met. Like we were on my first trip to visit him in Berlin, when we sat in the smoky darkness of Reinhard’s Otello Bar near the River Spree and stared at one another over glasses of Berliner Pilsner while planning our next move…
The present plan is this: the moment Christian is safe and snug in his Seattle dorm room, Jan and I will be on a plane to our first “longish-term” destination. We haven’t decided exactly which city we’ll initially call home, but we have a fairly well-developed list of initial options: Barcelona, Lisbon, New York City, Sydney, Berlin. You can be sure of one thing, though. Wherever we go, it will be sunny and warm. Because the plan is to chase the SUMMER.
Nearly everything we do and every decision we make right now is in service of the ENDLESS SUMMER. In service of living two or three months at a time in different cities where the sun is shining, and long pants are optional, and we can focus on loving life and one another. My entire business has been designed to facilitate the ENDLESS SUMMER.
Why are we practicing?
Because, like every PrimeTime couple in the world with teenage kids, it’s been for-frickin-ever since we’ve lived alone. It’s been what feels like an eternity since it was just about “us.” Because out of the 21 years we’ve been together, 18 of them have been focused on the other human in our house… the one who’s needed guidance, love, attention, money, school supplies, healthy meals (OMG—they need three-a-day for so long), a more-than-occasional kick in the pants or lesson about the realities of life, and the lion’s share of our time and energy.
But more than that, because LOVE, in and of itself, is a practice. It’s like playing the guitar or speaking French or public speaking. The more you do it, the better you get. The more you focus on it, the more skilled and committed you become. The more you master the fundamentals, the nuance, the rhythm, the cadence, the range, the depth and breadth of feeling… the more you enjoy what you make out of it.
Love is a practice. And as Christian starts his senior year of high school, we are practicing like mo-fo’s over here. Rehearsing for the big show…
Somewhere along my way in life, I decided to do love well. I realized it made me deliriously happy—loving and being loved—and I made a choice to master it. I was not always good at it. As a young woman I was needy, co-dependent, manipulative, and filled with self-loathing. So the choice to master love was a bold one. But I weighed the options and determined that the reward was worth the risk involved… and that I would love as many people as I could as hard as I could for as long as I could. And I made the even bolder choice to ALLOW myself to be loved in return.
It was the single best choice I ever made. And today, I can say with total honesty, that loving is my most well-developed skill.
Lots of PrimeTime women talk to me about love. About dating. About marriage. About friendship. About parenting. About building tribes and making loving connections with their brands and businesses. About giving love and FEELING WORTHY TO RECEIVE IT. Love—in some form or another—floats to the top of nearly every coaching call or strategy session I have.
So in this, my next series of messages to you, I want to talk about LOVE in all its forms.
Because love, my friend, is not something you find. It’s not something you fall into. It’s not something you receive. It’s something you BECOME. And PrimeTime is the perfect time to BECOME someone new.
Love is a practice.
How many hours will you put in today?
With love, from Vancouver.
Juju
LOVE this, and had the privilege of learning from both you and Jan during your visit to Whistler. About being intentional about the words we use. About committing to kindness. Thank you, and LOVE YOU Juju!
You are all love, my friend. All love. Thank you.