Your Life is Your Prayer / Vision Limited

Limited Vision 

I try to use vision and values to guide my life. Some of the visions are as simple as “I think I’d enjoy wearing a pair of blue shoes.”  Some have been a little more involved: walk away from a career and see what comes; consider giving up complete independence and partner with one or more of our adult children on future living arrangements; start a new business, then another, then expand even more. 

I’ve carried out each of those visions and they are all still in process (and I have blue shoes!). My businesses have kept expanding and my travel requirements (and joys!) have continued to expand. I travel from small to medium-sized towns to work at each office. I had a vision one or two years ago that traveling in a small motor home could be so much easier—no more carrying a suitcase, no more finding a restaurant for every meal, no more driving 42-90 miles for a hotel (I work in a natural disaster zone and hotel rooms are hard to come by.) We had a little footwork to do and we did it, but then we stopped.

Every Friday morning my partner, Suzanne, and I review our values, visions, goals, and action items. For about six months the RV came up as “Nope, didn’t do it again.”  Then we would move on with our list. For reasons I don’t know, on Friday, September 20, 2019, we noticed that we had never taken any action on looking into RVs. We scheduled Monday, 9/23/19 to get into action. By that afternoon we had our RV. 

What changed?  Scheduling. We had never scheduled the vision of actually owning an RV.  It started me wondering how often that happens: the underuse of scheduling of visions.  

Quite some time back I stopped saying when I wanted “X.”  I had noticed that I almost always got what I envisioned, so what did “when” matter?  I like knowing that it’s coming and waiting in curious, excited observation of how and when, but I’m realizing now that there are visions that it’s most effective to schedule. (I always respond to new a new vision by creating a financial category, but I don’t always include a timeline.) 

The underuse of scheduling of visions. 

This idea strikes me as so important! It could be because I’m getting older and time no longer seems infinite, but I think it’s something beyond an awareness of aging. I’ve asked myself if there are reasons to not fulfill visions and, so far, I’ve come up with these thoughts:

—Each Vision fulfillment brings with it new responsibilities;

—Each Vision fulfillment brings monetary, time, mental, and emotional costs;

—Each fulfillment of a Vision is potentially life-changing (and I’m normal enough to harbor a few whines about having to deal with change.) Maybe not scheduling a Vision is a slippery way of not dealing with change;

—to schedule a Vision means risking not getting it. 

This new conversation has me AWAKE!  I’m asking myself if I have other Visions to schedule and if I’m willing to do that scheduling. I’ve written a new prayer based on an old prayer and I’m praying it regularly:

Divine, grant me the Serenity to embrace the Visions that come to me and the wisdom to know when it’s my job to schedule fulfilling a Vision. 

Do you have any unfulfilled visions? Fill free to use my prayer. Maybe, as was true about my RV, you’re only one scheduled event away from fulfillment! 

I have other prayers you can incorporate in my newest book: Your Life Is Your Prayer

Original post found here.