"You see – and yet you are blind."
A bridge is a construct that helps you cross a chasm with greater ease, speed, and comfort. While it takes time and resources to build a bridge, once built is serves you well for many years. The stronger, wider, and better built the more effective and longer lasting the bridge will be.
Vision is a great gift. Those who lack the ability to see physically must exert significant additional effort to achieve the same ends, though it is amazing what the blind can and do accomplish. Nonetheless it would be the rare blind individual who would not deeply desire the gift of sight were it possible. Vision is a process taking sensory inputs from your environment which are processed by the vision centers of the brain into useful information, pictures if you will. With these pictures we can make judgments about beauty, color, scale, distance, and more.
Vision constitutes a bridge between the actual world and our imagined or potential world. Taking actual things your mind interprets, categorizes, sorts, and retrieves what it needs. As my mother taught me when I was learning to drive, when I am going slow, I need to focus more immediately to the front of the car. The faster I go the further ahead I need to look since what is ahead will be right in front of me within seconds. In both cases knowing where you want to go is essential. To be a good driver you must switch easily and quickly between what is right in front of you and what is far distant as you pursue your end goal.
Similarly, you can use your vision as a source of guidance and inspiration looking further ahead than you can immediately see (Please, not while you are driving!). This type of vision is focused on what is important to you, but not necessarily what is real right now. It uses the power of imagination to rise above your past to envision then create your desired future. As the old saying goes “What the human mind can perceive it can achieve.”.
Contrasts can be useful, so I use the term blind as contrast to vision. If you have no vision for your desired future, you are blind. Would you choose to be blind? Most of us live day to day and we wonder why things don’t get better. One reason is that we lack vision, though we seldom lack an excuse.
Here are 4 ways that your vision can bridge the chasm of blindness from your present to your desired future:
It is a bridge between your conscious and unconscious mind. The vision you create could be considered a mission statement, the deeply held beliefs you hold, or even a simple picture. The more senses you can employ the stronger with vision will become – touching, hearing, smelling, feeling, tasting, and seeing. This bridge helps you identify and exploit opportunities in the key areas of your life.
It is a bridge between what is most important and what you think and do. This vision is like creating a blueprint before you start to dig the foundation and build your house. With the vision for the house you start one step at a time to build the physical reality of your house. Your vision that you hold in your mind is your blueprint before your actions create its reality.
It is a bridge to reducing anxiety. Homosapien is the “one who knows”, and if you have the capacity to know you have the capacity to worry. Your imagination can be a serious problem if you allow it to ruminate on what is possible but not likely, and a serious tool for good if used to worry well. This means using your imagination to replace worry with calmness, curiosity, and creativity. By focusing your imagination on what you want, and your activities on what you can control (versus concerns that you cannot control), you unleash creative power to make your life better and reduce unnecessary anxiety.
It is a bridge to being and living as a whole person. As your vision is inclusive of your whole person (Career, Family, Personal Development, Relationships, Spirituality) you start to see each aspect of your life in context and prioritize. Your priorities do have to change from time to time, but your integrity to your values should not. As you build on the unshakable foundation of core values, your capacity to weather the challenges from all aspects of life are strengthened. The faster things change in your environment the more essential your integrity to your values, all of them as a whole person becomes.
May you be patient and persistent as you seek greater vision to guide your life and avoid the struggles of self-inflicted blindness.
HVASF provides an automatic, small, daily dose of motivation that you don’t have to do anything to get except what you likely already do – turn on your phone. With this daily dose you are primed mentally to take the further steps to live intentionally, accomplish your goals, and attain balance. This small daily nudge can help you overcome your inertia and start to turn vision into reality. Click here to find out more www.hvasf.com