True to form for artistic things, I was late to the party when it came to creating a vision board for my future.
After decades without a vision board, I wondered if I should waste my time planning and envisioning my future, or what’s left of it. But one of my instructors suggested the class might want to do this, to set realistic personal goals, topped off with a couple of pie-in-the-sky dreams. My words, not his.
If we don’t plan our future, we’re going to arrive there anyway. And then what? Maybe some of us have drifted through life, just letting things happen to us, or maybe we’ve been trapped in a cage for decades with little or no choice. (Many lives have been a mixture, I’m sure.)
Yet I’ve always been word-oriented while others by nature learn better from seeing things. Or at very least, their learning is reinforced by pictures.
A Word of Caution: Your brain will often think that completing a vision board is the same as completing the goals on it! Much like a writer telling someone what their next book is about. Ok, that’s done! Now I can go back to anything else I feel like doing.
My vision board is filled now, after several weeks of trying to find suitable pictures in magazines. In my case, I’m planning for my retirement. Yes, for those few who know me well, that is a joke! I’ll never be able to retire and write novels, for financial reasons that stem from having cared for a very sick husband for over 20 years.
Even so, the years and the pix represent what would have been the residue of my retirement phase. And for those itching to find out how many “assets” I own, what little I have is already allocated to cover my spare existence for the next 20 years.
If you’re really nosey, you can come over and dig up my dead, hardpan backyard and haul away rogue trees while you’re at it. Maybe you’ll even find buried treasure. One of my probable water vigilante neighbors who claims he lived here 50 years ago is quite interested in my backyard. Hard to tell if he’s looking for moldy cash or bones, but the proper people know about it. The rest of you can take that as a warning.
What’s On My Vision Board?
Some items on my vision board are very personal, as yours will be. That means I’m not going to tell you what they are. But I can share some of the more worldly items:
- No more alarm clocks! No clock radios, no smartphone alarms. And if my next neighbors turn out to have roosters, I’ll learn to ignore them. I did when I was a child, visiting Nanna in the countryside.
One of the reasons I get crabby is because alarm clocks are instruments of torture for those who have already been woken up three times during the night, often by health issues or drunken neighbors, and so forth. Let me wake up on my own, without interrupting light, deep or REM sleep, and I’m good to go, ready for the day. Sleep deprivation is the bane of our society, next to the telephone, and far more dangerous.
- Being able to write and earn a few supplemental dollars from wherever I live, even as an ex-pat. My social security just might let me live somewhere less expensive and less hate-filled than the U.S. has become. Might.
- Having enough of my hard-earned SSA income left over to contribute to the poor and needy and abused, including 4-legged friends for whom we are God’s stewards!!! I know compassion itself is a gift that not all have but we can ask God to give us a compassionate heart. And then do something with it.
- A car is just transportation but having a reliable vehicle that I’m not ashamed to park in other people’s driveways would be nice.
- Reading, reading, reading.