2021:Daring to Make a Vision Board

                                    

Did your vision board for last year end up in the trash? I'll be honest there was one day in particular when I wanted to take mine out to the yard and set fire to it. My 2020 vision board was so powerful it caused a global pandemic and nationwide lockdown so I could stay at home and get all my projects done. 

Sorry world. I didn't know my own strength. 

My word of the year was Fika, a Swedish word meaning to slow down and enjoy the good things in life and I wanted to "make time for wellness." 

It had a picture on it of a woman with beautiful gray hair but I didn't plan on stopping coloring mine until I was 60 because there's always a trip planned or an event to attend. 

If only no one would see me while it grew out, I'd do it, I thought. 

You can see why I put extra thought into my action board for 2021. You can feel safe in knowing that there is nothing on this year's board about staying at home or slowing down. 

Now, you might be saying, "Michelle, what about all that's going on right now? How do we make a plan with so much uncertainty?" To which I say, any certainty we ever have in this life is an illusion. Especially when it concerns other people. 

But what we have is control over ourselves.

“Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, ‘He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.‘”

~Jordan Peterson

With that in mind, I gave a lot of thought to what should be on my vision board when I made it over the holidays. To be honest, as I've covered in a previous post, I let 2020 be an excuse to become soft and weak and slovenly. I gained extra weight. I spent too much time on social media. I read less and watched more television than I have in years. I wasn't my best self in the past 12 months. 

Read my post Straight Talk for the New Year. 

Setting ourselves in order doesn't get any more basic than getting our bodies in shape. So I've started there. In fact, that is the only real aim of the first 75 days of 2021. The overarching priority of the year is family. We aren't best serving our families if we are tired and unmotivated.  Following closely behind is a return to serious reading, something that was at the center of my day for a quarter of a century but was edged out in the past few years by other things.

Here's how it looks applied to a vision or as I prefer to call it most of the time an ACTION board. You'll  notice the entire bottom half is dedicated to travel. We have to have hope, right? 

Half of the board is about health and habits. In future posts I'll be sharing more about my actual plan. 

The other half of the board is dedicated to family, community, and embracing this particular part of life.

Last year's board was filled with beekeeping and gardening and home projects. You can see that there are casual nods to them this year because they are built into life and don't need special concentrated effort. 

We need some hope, right? Make sure you put some on your board! 

And after a year in which millions of people have lived in fear, struggled with depression and lack of motivation, and all the (insert your favorite expletive here) rest of it we need to focus on living beyond fear and focusing on our mental health. Again, getting ourselves in order. 

How are you going about planning your year? What was your biggest struggle in 2020? What did you learn about yourself and how is that going to affect how you live in this fledgling new year?