I know you’ve done this.
You’ve gone into a closet or room in your home intending to simply put something away and 3 hours and 5 playlists later you emerge with 4 giant garbage bags and a joyful sense of space.
So that was me. This weekend. In our storage room.
I read hilarious old letters from my college roommate, blew dust off of old family photos, stacked up adorable pics of our kids when they were tiny, and then I found something amazing: a vision board I created in 2008. (I’ve created only 2 such vision boards in my life. This was #1.)
Here (photo below) is a collage of a few of the pages.
I ran my hands over it in disbelief. You may not be able to read all of the fine print, but you guys, this is crazy. I had not consciously considered starting a national (or any) organization at this point. My mentor can attest to that.
I simply enjoyed an evening filled with clarity, live music, and vision board creation among a group of women I’d never met in a beautiful soulful place in Asheville, NC. There was zero sense that I was on a JOURNEY here. No sense of what may occur on the other side of putting my intentions in writing, torn magazine images, and scraps of poems I’d written long ago.
(And we were instructed to bring a photo of ourselves. You know how we all love images of ourselves, so there was that part too.)
What happened from there takes some time to tell of course. But THIS part, this is what people do not believe. Most people do not believe in the power of writing things down, of setting intentions, of picturing and visualizing what they want. And here’s the kicker: I didn’t know WHAT I wanted. I just knew how I wanted my life to FEEL. I knew who and what I cared about. I gave voice to the pieces of me that I’d forgotten in the haste and exhaustion of motherhood, career-hood, and keeping up with what I thought was the life I wanted. (And that was BEFORE Pinterest. Not sure how any young mother gets beyond Pinterest-comparison now. Whew.)
But words and phrases on this vision board such as: FEAR LESS; WRITE; TELL YOUR STORY; YOUR DREAMS MISS YOU; IMAGINE WANTING MORE AND GETTING IT; WHEN YOU’RE SO CLEAR ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO DO I THINK THE STARS ALIGN; and (referring the baby footprints): IN MANY WAYS YOU ARE UNEXPLORED and LABOR OF LOVE. Or from one of my own NICU-focused poems cut into pieces there, “…BECAUSE AT LAST WE WILL HAVE LISTENED, RESPONDED, AND ACTED IN SYNC WITH THE PRIVILEGED SPACE YOU SO OPENLY SHARE”.
In my opinion, it is no coincidence that NANT was birthed into the world just 19 months later.
Of course, it’s not like the work it took to create NANT dropped out of the sky between that day and October of 2009. But that day, in those mountains, I didn’t know where my seemingly simple intentions would take me.
Why am I telling you this?
1) It usually takes getting away from the typical grind of daily life to remember that you GET to have visions for your life and 2) I want you to consider that every time you speak, write something down, or put your energy into the world, it means something. The clearer and more aligned those things are, the clearer and more aligned your path becomes. There is no one path, no pinnacle we are trying to reach, but the journey is so much deeper and richer when you allow yourself to put your visions on paper.
In fact, they might actually come true.
