When I was in high school I attended a leadership workshop which emphasized the importance of visioning. The keynote speaker lead us through an exercise in which we closed our eyes and imagined what we would like to have happen with our programs in the coming year. Then he encouraged us to think bigger, about what we wanted to have happen in our lives and in the world. He then had us gather up in small groups to share these visions with others.

When one of my group mates, a redhead named Stephanie, described wanting her kitchen to smell of cinnamon I was delightfully surprised at how easy it was for me to imagine myself into that space. She had certainly taken to heart the instruction to be specific in our visions. It was the sort of place I wanted to spend a rainy afternoon. (To this day, inspired by Stephanie’s vision for her someday kitchen, one of my favorite design exercises for the workshops I teach is to explore sensory experiences. What do you want to hear in your home? What do you want to see?)

After sharing our visions aloud with others, we took time to write them down. We were encouraged to doodle and to use color. Then we signed our names to them. Our (truly) motivational speaker told us that those who share their visions are significantly more likely to achieve them. And those who write them down are even more likely to achieve them. And those who sign them are even more likely to achieve them. (There’s this thing about accountability, it turns out. And when this workshop speaker said that people who capture their visions in writing are significantly more likely to achieve them, he meant it. There’s scientific evidence behind each of these elements of capturing. By the time I learned about these principles in my social psychology classes in college I had been employing these tricks for years.)

I left that leadership workshop when I was sixteen years old with a vision, tucked into an envelope, which I knew was a gift to my future self. I decided to do this visioning thing each year. And while it’s taken different forms over the years, I have continued to do visioning at new years and other pivot points.

I found that teenage vision tucked in its envelope a couple months ago when I was settling back into The Lucky Penny. I spent a day on a winding journey down memory lane as I looked through the scrapbooks I had meticulously created back in the analog days of high school and college. And I found myself laughing and tearing up as I discovered how much of my vision has remained the same over the past twenty years. Even more fascinating, I found that most of the things I had jotted down have happened:

Finding, attending, and graduating from a college that was just the right fit for me

Owning a home of my own

Learning to grow a garden full of flowers and food

Attending graduate school in a fascinating field

Living in an intentional community

Designing and building my own home

Living abroad

And yet there are also things I didn’t know to hope for that have also happened. I didn’t know that I’d love my college enough to stay for another six years as the community service coordinator. I didn’t know that one of my roommates would become one of my best friends. I didn’t know that Yestermorrow would become one of my great loves and that I’d get to be a teacher there as well as a student. I didn’t know that tiny houses would become A Thing and that the first house I’d design and build for myself would be on wheels. I didn’t know I’d create my own company which would enable me to travel, teach, consult ,and design. Nor did I know that I’d help to create two of the first tiny house communities in America. What adventures these have been!

As I noted in my 2019 Recap and 2020 Look Ahead, this has been a time of big transition for me. And so my visioning has stretched out this year, to capture this pivot point. Cataloguing what I have learned about myself and listening for intuition and inspiration about the future. (Amusingly, those things I jotted down decades ago that haven’t happened I’m still hoping and working to manifest. Many of these things have made it onto a permanent Life List, another visioning tool, which I loved doing at Wild Women’s Weekends in Walla Walla. I’m so curious to see what else the Universe is scheming!)