Why Not Now?

We are beginning another year, 5787 on the Jewish calendar.  These Days of Awe are a time for us to reflect on the year that is ending and think about the year that is to come.  While making resolutions is associated more often with the secular new year, it seems to me that this is good time for taking stock and creating a plan for our future.

One of the ways that is often used to help unlock those future dreams is creating a vision board. It’s done in many settings, and we also have done it with our older adults.  It consists of taking pictures from magazines that represent something you want to include in the upcoming year.  Each of these photos is affixed to a poster board and it creates a visual reminder of what you want to focus on and what matters to you.  For example, you may have a picture of children playing to represent connecting with family or children.  You might use some appealing photos of food to symbolize sharing meals with people you care about or, alternatively, to focus on learning to cook healthy meals.  Many people put these vision boards in places they see them often, reminders of their desires for the year ahead.

For Rosh Hashanah, I like to do a variation on that vision board exercise, and I offer it, to you and your family, as an exercise to try.  I like to envision what the year ahead will look like by creating detailed images in my mind’s eye, images that I can revisit when I close my eyes at night or when I need to remember what is most important to me.  Among them are my dinner table laden with holiday food and the faces of our children around us.  Dreams for my personal and professional lives are distilled to specific moments or experiences I would like to have, giving me a palpable sense of what it would be like, how it would feel.

It’s an exercise that I think has meaning in our work with elders as well.  If we asked our family members to imagine a moment they would like to experience in the coming year, a moment of satisfaction, joy or meaning, and gave them a chance to share it with us, it would give us a deeper insight into what really matters to them and how we might help them make that dream a reality.

So many things are possible if we choose to make them possible.  Can we take a frail elder on a trip, to a Broadway show, on an adventure? We can.  And if we can’t, can we build an experience that will simulate the feeling? We can.  If, for example, your loved one was dreaming about a trip to Paris that they always wished that had taken but their health now precludes it.  Why not create a night in Paris, with videos and music and French food and wine?

Giving voice to our dreams, creating reality from possibility, providing the opportunity to satisfy deep-seated desires, what better way to help our elders and ourselves to begin the new year?