A note from Karen.
Listen to Karen’s note
I have made some beautiful vision boards.
I’ve cut out the houses, the clothes, the vacations, the pretty kitchens, and the women who somehow manage to drink coffee on a white sofa without spilling it.
I’ve pinned them to boards, pasted them into notebooks, and saved enough pictures to my phone to create several imaginary lives.
And then I waited.
The strange thing was, I really could picture those things. I could see the house. I could see the trip. I could see the beautiful room.
What I couldn’t see was me.
I was always standing outside the picture looking in.
That was the part I didn’t understand for a long time.
I thought imagining a different future meant deciding what I wanted and finding pictures of it. But eventually, I realized that I could change every picture around me and still carry exactly the same picture of myself.
The Law of Projection
That is what I now call the Law of Projection.
We are always projecting a picture forward, not just of what we think will happen, but of who we expect ourselves to be when we get there.
And sometimes that picture is old.
It may have been shaped by who needed us, what we could afford, what seemed practical, what other people expected, or simply by the life we happened to be living at the time.
There may be absolutely nothing wrong with that picture. You may even love it.
But one day you can look at a perfectly good life and hear a very quiet little voice say: I wonder what else there is.
A different question
I used to think that voice meant I wasn’t grateful enough. Now I think it may simply mean I’ve begun to see another picture.
That’s why I don’t make vision boards the way I used to.
Instead of asking, What do I want? I try to ask a different question:
Who am I in the picture?
What am I wearing? Where am I going? What am I talking about? What am I no longer worrying about? What does an ordinary Tuesday look like for her?
And then I do something that once would have sounded rather silly to me.
I remember her.
Not as someone I hope to become someday, but as someone I’ve already met in my imagination.
A Future Memory
That’s the difference between a wish and what I call a Future Memory.
You don’t have to dislike the life you’re living to imagine another version of it. Sometimes the picture you’re carrying has simply gotten too small for the woman you’ve become.
This Editor’s Note appears in Issue 1 of See It. Become It.
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