Walk With Your Wife in the Morning

Ta eis heauton

I added a new practice to my morning routine: walking with Camille.

First thing upon waking, we roll out of bed, get changed, then walk. We talk about a few things on our walks:

• General check-ins with our emotional states and anything on our minds.

• Daily intentions on what practices or tasks we aim to accomplish.

• Something we are grateful for.

A fun thing we are playing with on our walk is talking as if we are already living the beautiful life we are called to live, vividly describing a desired future state as if it were in the present.

“We walked out of our new home and just met our new neighbor, who we made some cookies for.”

Making it specific makes it feel more real. This practice is not done to escape the present but to emotionally feel the life we are called toward, which makes it feel possible. When something I am called to feels possible, I become encouraged to pursue it.

I like this walking practice; it is a great way to start the day and attune myself to the person I live for. We are good at connecting when we make the time. Still, we could be better at coordinating, and lousy coordination leads to less connecting—for example, finding ourselves on our phones when we can do something meaningful together, like going on a beautiful walk. I am seeing these morning walks marry both connection and coordination.

We sense this practice will stick. Like personal practices, "couple practices" sometimes do not stick, which is okay because practice experiments are needed in one's ecology of practices. I find syncing my ecology with Camille's and being senseful of our joint practices critical. If one of our ecologies is out of wack, the others will also be.

We are always experimenting with couple practices, trying to dial in our ecology to meet that connection/coordination sweet spot. Here are three other practices we recently experimented with: