Vision Boards are Cute. Here's What Actually Helped.

The year is 2020.

I’m confused, sad, lonely, and living in a house with my soon-to-be ex-husband. I’m also wiping down groceries with disinfectant wipes while my kids attend school on Zoom. Some days I’m worried the world isn’t going to make it. Other days I’m halfway hoping I don’t have to.

Things were… not great.

My ex-husband and I had separated during COVID, but we kept it a secret from the kids. It felt cruel to ask them to believe the world was ending and their family at the same time. The divorce was mostly my decision, so I decided I should be the one to move out eventually. At the time, I guess I felt like I’d already done enough.

As 2021 approached, I started the exhausting process of finding a new home for me and my children. What I didn’t realize was that finding the house would have much less to do with real estate… and much more to do with imagination.

Before you start cutting pictures out of magazines just know I have nothing against vision boards. I actually think they’re fun. There’s something about scissors and paper, the sound of it, the finality of the cut, that does feel genuinely good. They help you clarify what you want. The problem is they often stop there. A vision board gives your eyes something to look at. It doesn’t give your nervous system somewhere new to live.

The exercise that changed everything for me looked completely different.

It’s called a Living Vision.

I took out a blank piece of paper and wrote one sentence across the top: This or something greater, for the highest good of all concerned — because maybe I don’t know, maybe there’s something better, maybe I’m open to being surprised. That sentence feels like nature’s insurance policy. Then I didn’t write what I wanted. I wrote what I imagined it would feel like.

Not: East-facing windows.

But: Every morning I wake up with warm sunlight on my face. Looking out over the treetops makes my nervous system exhale. I feel safe, inspired and at home here.

The key is to write it like you’re living it now. Not in the past, not in the future. NOW. One is a real estate listing. The other is a life I could actually feel my way into.

The more specific I became about the feeling, the more real it became to me. Not because I believed I was magically ordering from the universe like it was Amazon Prime. Because I was practicing inhabiting the version of myself who already felt at home. That’s a very different exercise.

Read it a few times a day. Feel it. Yes, out loud. Yes, alone in your kitchen. Yes, even though you feel insane. Read it like you’re doing a table read with God at the head of the table. This is your moment. The universe may or may not need convincing. You definitely do.

Which is the thing about leaving room for something greater.

Maybe that’s why I don’t spend much time making vision boards anymore. I got what I was looking for. I just didn’t know I was looking for it until I stopped describing it and started feeling it.

The woman who stood in that kitchen in 2020 wiping down groceries with Lysol wipes, halfway hoping she didn’t make it. She made it. She got the terrace. She got the park. She got something better than she knew to ask for.

Which, it turns out, was always the point.

If you try this exercise, please tell me what happens. Not because I need to be right about it. Because I want to know what your terrace looks like.

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