Today is New Year’s Day 2021. Each year on New Year’s Eve, Mark and I have a tradition to eat sushi, drink a favorite bottle of wine and reflect on the past year through our vision boards. We always start the year with a vision of the things we would like to accomplish come year’s end. Some of the things relate to financial, physical, spiritual, educational, work related or family related goals. As usual we spent some time last night reviewing our vision boards and noticing all of the things that were manifested over the year. I’m proud to say that a lot of our hopes and vision for the year came forth. For example, starting this blog, or writing of some kind has been on my vision board for several years and last year we launched! Today’s blog, however, will not be about processing 2020, I believe we all have done a lot of that, and I, for one, am burned out on 2020. My thoughts today went to 2016. In 2016 Mark and I got married, I had a major unexpected job change and we bought and moved into our current home. Mark and I had been together for 6 years by the time we got married. We had already weathered many storms together and had decided to finally make it “official”. In many ways we had been quite content with not being married but there was something about marking the day and committing to each other and our families in that way that just seemed right. The timing was right. Shortly after getting married, I faced a job change that I hadn’t expected. That change weighed heavy on my heart as I really loved my work and my team. It was at that time that I reached out to a mentor of mine and began working at my current job. Very shortly after that job change, we found and bought our “forever home”. We had been talking about selling our suburban house and moving to the country for many years and it was at that time that we were seeing changes in our neighborhood that prompted us to start actively looking for our little property. The timing was right. With the exception of our impending wedding, none of those events were anything we envisioned on New Year’s Day 2016. 2021 is the five year anniversary of all of those events and they were all life changing events for us. The lesson I have taken is that while we can certainly plan, try to set ourselves up for success, set our goals and the action steps to achieve them; our ability to recognize the good in things will keep us thriving. That job change at the time was difficult and painful AND it was the absolute best thing that happened to us. That job change enabled us to purchase our home that we had dreamed of for many years. That job change has us in our current position to be able to support our family in ways that we could only hope for. We are thriving because of that job change. The timing was right. Sometimes our thriving comes from getting through those things that we couldn’t have predicted and staying faithful that something good will come from the struggle. I don’t know what 2021 is going to bring but I do know that chances are there will be blessings, challenges, losses and successes and we will continue to thrive.