The Vision is Action

A recalibration of the act of vision-boarding

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Change is vehicular. Impatient. Wise. Knowing us before we do, it heals us through forced motion. Resist or give in. Yet, ultimately you will always have to give in. Some days as I sit on my bed a wave of sadness meets me. A slow, colorless wind. As it brushes over my face, another month restricted in my room - I wonder, is this it?

I’m finally grasping how to keep my health and (most of) my sanity maintained during this pandemic. It wavers, but mostly I’ve got it covered. However, there is something else I haven’t quite figured out how to retrieve. How to wrestle back from the wretched hands of yesteryear. Something that now feels so elusive to me. 

I’ve forgotten how to dream.

I’ve had a troubling past with vision boards. The trouble being they’ve never really worked out for me. I’d watch how the yearly exercise would literally change my friends lives. But for me, the bulk of the board never came true. I would guess it was partly due to the fact I treated them like glorified Pinterest boards. Where they’d instill some kind of inspiration in me but more so an agonizing awe. One that felt like it created more separation between me and what I wanted. A funhouse mirror that contorted and magnified the space between where I was and where I was not. I mean, my vision boards would get me excited. But for a future, and for a self, that was not yet real. I knew this year had to be different. 

Late December, I confided in a friend how daft making a vision board felt. With so much confusion living in the air, how could I formulate or rely on any kind of tangible foundation or metric of success for myself? Sure, I could muster putting few goals on it but that’s not what I needed. I needed something to hold me. That told me I was already real. Something that didn’t rely on any kind of outside validation. I needed a mirror. 

Thus, we came to an agreement. We would not be making the quintessential vision boards, but instead warped versions that were our own. We would corrupt the Vision Board God’s holy plans and make something twisted, and bent. A conglomeration of an art project meeting abstract collage work. That’s what we wanted - art. 

So, we set to work. We grabbed experimental magazines, neon paint, glitter, fresh flowers, and two extra large white canvas boards. We gave ourselves one week to finish the task. There would be no goals or dream bodies, money figures or exotic destinations. We would only compile those things which struck a chord in us; that we would look at and know, something in here is me. We set our deadline as New Years Eve. One week to finish. Which for two notorious procrastinators was definitely an interesting task.

First, I started robust. Filled with ideas! Excited for conception! I talked on and on about how energized I was by the idea of where this board was headed. I could barely close my eyes and sleep at night. It all felt so hypnotically real. Poetic. A beacon of my restyled artistic hope. An ingenious striking of an old premise to create something free. 

Then, as we gathered our tools, I noticed I became less and less confident. More apprehensive. Resigned. Afraid. Every decision I had to make to decide the final outcome was met with so much resistance and stagnation. At one point I looked out at all my materials laid before me, each one I had ceremoniously chosen just before, but now…had brought me so much strife. I didn’t understand - why?

I felt bouts of lethargy, paranoia, sadness, and mental paralysis during the height of constructing my board. Which caught me incredibly off guard. I thought it was going to be fun and easy. An exercise of passion. I had imagined it all so well in my head. Why was it so hard match the vision in real life? 

And there is when it started to reveal itself.

I was triggered. Everything was fine until I had to put my idealized materials together. Permanently. Because it was in that permanence, I risked not achieving the dream I imagined for them. The one I loved and clung onto so dearly. This feeling felt so ominously similar to countless moments I’ve had in my past. Where the execution of my dreams did not live up to the fantastical conception of them.

Except this time, I was staring right at it. The unfinished board was reflecting my chronic inaction.

It was there I unveiled something crucial about myself. I don’t make solid decisions in my life out of the fear that they will not live up to what I dreamt up of them. I remain passive and indecisive, instead opting for my dreams to meet me. Hoping for the flow of fate to reliably seize me where I am. That way I remain safe and unscathed from the failure of making a true decision. Because it’s when I actively attempt to make a dream real that I lose the fantasy. The dream dissipates the moment I run towards it.

But, I had to meet a deadline. My usual procrastination wouldn’t work here. 

So, I had to give in. 

I had to let go of the dream. 

It was the only way I could be released from the burden and finish. I reasoned with myself that even if I hated it, even if it was terrible, it was never supposed to be about what it looked like. But rather, the experience of finishing it. Of allowing it to become this symbolic shattering of my resistance. A firework display of my insides. I told myself no matter how it turned out it would be a representation of my becoming. Even if it meant that it was kind of ugly, and not as great as I thought it would be. 

So, I finished. I met the deadline. It was weirdly painful, until it wasn’t. Once I let go of the outcome and submerged into the immediate now, I found my flow. And the finished product became so striking, it takes my breath away every time I look at it. 

It was never about the validity of vision boards. They are absolutely a life-altering tool. But, some of us need to use our intuitive liberties and tweak the premise. This reconceptualization revealed to me what was missing from the boards of my past. Although, I would put in the work to conceptualize my dreams, I assumed that would be enough. The board would somehow do the rest. Consulting whatever magic was in the air and carefully start spinning it into an elaborate web. Just waiting for me to walk through it. Carelessly absorbed in my desired fate.

But, vision comes in two parts: conception and release. We must draft the blueprint and upon completion, freely let it go. We must leave one hand for God, the Universe, Source - the invisible hand that guides the movement of our lives. We must trust we will be given that second hand. 

I do this now with the firm knowledge of my being and a release of where I am being launched. 

A different life comes with a different task. A repurposing of momentum to adhere to a divergent direction. A commitment to suffocating indecision, paralysis, and drought. Understand you will perpetually control a certain amount of variables. The rest is for the air to decide. Your action is required to activate the fate you desire. You decide what rooms you walk into, what people you meet, and the art you make. The missing link is you. I kept myself so separate from the material power of my ferocious dreams. Suspended above my head like an invisible, gnarling halo. Some days I thought they would eat my alive. The intangible requires friction to be birthed. What you envision in your head, as it drips through your subconscious, will encounter obstacles upon transmuting into real life. Your dream to be an artist will be different when you live it. But, it will be better. Dreaming is one way to endure the monotonous nature of our passing lives, especially during times like these; yet, we have to know when to pack up the dream and start willing ourselves to live. To wake ourselves up, so that we do not miss our fruit. 

The dream is never then, it is always now.

Courage is both blind and true. Bold and battered. When I look at my vision board I see that. I see that process. I see what I created out of what I was given and how I made it into a message. That means more to me than any idealized fantasy I would have come up with. 

My life is a vision which I propel into meaning each day, by taking what is given to me and painting it with what is real. It is in these subtle movements of my daily life that I stretch into the elongated unknown. Where if I focus on the tenacity of my foundation, the surge of my internal world, I have a pinging hope that my desired reality will be granted. Even though it forever remains in flux.

My mind doesn’t have the tangible vocabulary yet to envision what a truly empowered future looks like for me. I think I have to just live it. In each experience. Each second. Without grasp. Devoting my concept of freedom to be as free as its definition. To evolve with the hope that one day, it will amass into a truth I can wrap my life around. Own the words to. But for now, I realize and accept that I am unable. 

There is a perilous shift that occurs when changing worlds. Upon leaving the old, hovering, anticipating to inhabit somewhere new. It is in this transitory state -  the crashing of orbs, the advent of stars - we discover the nucleus of our being. What we are destined to keep. The rest, we dissolve with destruction to ferment and initiate new soil. We take the dead and arm it with the living. A mutation that sends us shooting. Whipping around ourselves. Breaths of cold wind saved by the warmth of vitality. A hybrid of natures. With vigilance, we must continue to adjust our revolution. And there, absorbed in our boundless fate, spinning endlessly - we boomerang into becoming. 

We don’t just end up somewhere new. We become something new. 

New soil. New planet. New galaxy. New world. My board reminds me of the tenacity of space. A watchful eye over the stars. Our destination is unknown. Yet, I am so armed and so deliciously equipped for battle, I like it better that I get to choose every day how I administer my artillery. To continuously rebirth myself into new heavenly bodies. Galaxies of pristine purpose and momentum. 

I revel in these actions. I bask in its blemishes. And I choose to live, until vision matches my orbit and wraps its loving arms around me.

There comes a certain point where life soberly demands to be lived. Where the dream must be feverishly shaken out. Left on the earthbound floor, only to be resuscitated by the sparks ignited by the friction of your running feet. It’s not that I forgot how to dream. I just had to run away from them.

The dream will not leave you to become real. You have to leave it.

So run.

Run until you sweep through the stars like Mercury, the wing-footed Roman God. 

Where vision will meet you like a mirror.