Your life is the vision board. Better get a new glue stick.

Such anticipation!

The stack of magazines is ready. My glue sticks are standing at attention.

The making of the vision board is about to begin.

What’s this I see on the top shelf of the closet? 2012’s vision board? I’m still not that thin, well nourished, rested, empowered, abundant. My house is still not HGTV worthy.

What if we told the truth about our real lives, not the lives we lust after, desire, and postpone living for? Instead of the Hallmark card or Successories poster version we usually hear, it might sound something like this: My real life practices are to over-schedule myself, be so overbooked that I’m always late and I hate being late, look forward to appointments canceling so I can breathe, sit all day at my desk without moving, scarf down candy for lunch, and forget to floss.

Or perhaps they are: My life practices are to hide from confrontation, run toward easy fixes that don’t last, and, evidently, to perpetuate a huge gap between intention and action.

Truth.

The edges on a vision board are clean, neat, tidy, in colors that are clear. But life is dirty, messy, chaotic, and its colors are often muddy, like mixing one color too many with the ones already on your palette and having it go ochre brown suddenly. (MULTIPLE METAPHORS ALERT)

It’s a beautiful, awkward, hot thing when you come at the truth of life head-on. Because there’s stuff in there to notice, to learn from, to get over feeling ashamed about in order to move into greater alignment between your real life and your vision board life. And when you resist the true muddiness of life, those demons of “not enough” just get bigger and bigger. Embracing it tames them, shrinks them, asks them out to dinner so you can get to know them.

What are your real practices, not the printed, laminated list on the wall behind your desk or on your neatly scribed day planner “notes” page? Procrastinate until the night before something important is due, stop listening before your partner stops talking. The list might be endless. And that’s okay. That just means there is more potency for learning.

Same with goals. We create lofty ones, and drag out the two past issues of Oprah we can bear to part with, grab our scissors and glue stick and go to town making a vision board. We have images of fresh fruits and vegetables, but no Little Debbie Cakes. We feature people in motion, not bent over a desk all day. We include houses that no one could possibly live in and remain sane, the impulse to pick up each piece of lint would be so well-developed.

We create vision boards of our ideal lives.

But we don’t live ideal lives.

And we never will.

What if imagining our future is actually the thing holding us back?

This vision board process is inspirational. I’ve done vision boards myself. It is fun, redecorating my life with a few snips of the scissors. I think they have real meaning, but the gap between “this” and “that” is also disheartening and shaming. What if we just stick with “this” for a while instead, to explore how and why our current reality is the way it is, those decisions below the surface that create the structure of our land, like rocks dictating the direction of the mountain stream.

A short article about clutter sparked my thinking about this, an image I cannot shake – and I believe it goes beyond clutter.

You don’t have to look very far to see what you’re manifesting. Your home is literally a giant vision board. That’s because it’s a 3D expression of your energy field.

Artwork, pictures, books, closets, cabinets, bedroom, office – it’s all an expression of the energy that you’re beaming out into the world. And the world is a giant mirror that reflects back what you are emitting out. 

Imagine if you could paste your home onto a flat one-dimensional board. Spread it all out like a map of the world. Look at all of it objectively, not just the pretty parts, but the closets, cupboards, and clutter too. Those storage areas represent our subconscious mind and often where our subconscious blocks hide.

How is your home not in alignment with what you want? What needs to go? What is stuffed, cramped, outdated? What would be a better representation? Inspirational artwork, curtains you love instead of tolerate, current books, functional rooms. 

If your home was a vision board, does it represent the life you want?

I will add this: If your LIFE was a vision board, what does it represent right now?

Because our lives are the vision boards, not the poster board one with magazine images buckling under the weight of glue stick. We are living it right now. We are smack dab in the middle of it.

So, look around. What does your vision board really look like? Start there, not in the idealized universe. The “what is.”

Mine?

I am crawling my way back to better nutrition and my house has that really “lived in” look. My gardens weren’t prepared for the winter, the house needs painting, and my living room is full of desks, sand tables, and animals. There are always things in need of fixing, and rarely do they get fixed because, life. I have always thought everything is possible, which spreads me too thin, and my health is suffering as a result.

I think I’ll make a vision board that represents that. 

The HGTV version of life exhausts me. The striving exhausts me. And I think it creates Idea Debt in me.

I try not to to look at what I’m going to do as this amazing great grand thing. I’m not just fulfilling some old promise that I made a long time ago. Now I’m actually solving problems in the moment, and that’s so much more exciting than than trying to fill years of what I like to call my “idea debt.” That’s when you have this dream of this awesome thing for years. You think, “Oh, I’m going to do this epic adventure. It’s going to be so great.” The truth is, no matter what you do, it will never be as great as it is in your mind, and so you’re really setting yourself up for failure.

I like snowboarding, and I used to like hitting all the jumps. And when I would go down the mountain, I would notice a bunch of young snowboarders who were waiting at the top of the jumps.

They may look like they’re waiting their turn. But in fact that they’re waiting there because they’re afraid to hit that jump. And what they don’t realize is that, over time they’re getting colder.

The Idea Debt of having to make that jump, and land it, and be impressive, is getting greater because of the amount of time they’re investing, waiting there, getting colder, at the top of the hill.

By the time they actually do it, they’re probably not going to fulfill that dream. So I learned to just hit the jump or pass it. Do it in the moment, or not at all. – Kazu Kibuishi

What if I cleaned up the board I’m living instead of creating an ideal one, a recognition of the gap between what I say I want and what I have created. What if I imagined my life as the vision board?

And another thing: The Bucket List. There is no bucket list except the one you are living right now. Stop separating real and ideal, now and someday, everyday life and extraordinary life. These are false dichotomies, my friend.

Your whole home is a vision board. Does it represent the life you want?

Your daily work or home schedule is a vision board. Does it represent the life you want?

Are you waiting for someday to create the life you want? Can you embrace the mess?