What’s Your Vision?
No regrets? Maybe a few regrets.
Journal: 9 June, 2025, morning.
Eight years ago I shared this on Facebook:
“What’s your vision? Even if you don’t answer, even if—especially if—you’ve never thought about having a vision, I hope you think about the question. We all have one, consciously or unconsciously, and it informs everything we do. Long ago, out of my vision, I began collecting and embracing a set of personal rules—rules that guide what I do, rules that do away with the need to determine each time how I respond to events in everyday life. Three of them are ‘Allow people their joy,’ ‘Promise sparingly, deliver unfailingly,’ and ‘People are more important than things.’ My vision has become clearer as I’ve grown older but its essence and the rules that have been born out of that essence have remained constant.”
My vision includes trying diligently to avoid practicing situational ethics, aka ethics determined by the specifics of a situation, one example being looking over and forgiving more easily the wrongdoing of people I like. That’s the halo effect, more or less, which basically says the people we like (or love) can do no wrong. What we condemn others for doing we accept from them. Our liking or loving them allows them to get away with a lot of wrongdoing without suffering the consequences of that wrongdoing. And situational ethics are self serving because they allow us to avoid uncomfortable collisions between what our conscience knows to be right or wrong and our relationships with people we care about.
If our vision is being a person of faith, a follower of Jesus, we still have to figure out what exactly that means in practical application. Jesus said “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” In practical application, how do you get up every morning and do that? What, precisely and exactly, does that look like?
What does that look like when you vote? When you attend a school board meeting? When you are in a long line at the grocery store? When a homeless person shows up in the church parking lot? When your child falls in love with a person of a different faith? Or a different race? When you’re posting on social media?
Doing the right thing sounds so simple, doesn’t it? And yet if you never spend introspective time thinking about how you define the right thing (and why you define it that way), how do you know if in the end you will still think it was the right thing to have done, the right way to have lived your life, practiced your faith, been true to your vision?
No regrets. A good bumper sticker, or tattoo. Impossible to have because we so often develop and refine our visions, our consciences, through doing things we want to do (obviously, because we do them) and later feeling bad about having done them. Have fewer regrets: a better goal, because it’s achievable. Possibly. Maybe.
That upward spiral, you know.
I’m just noodling around here now, thinking out loud, as I do so much. My way of figuring things out. I think a lot.
I care a lot though about doing as best I can to be true to my vision, of not just living my life willy-nilly, reacting to everything without thought, mindlessly. And you really cannot do that without knowing what your vision is and thus being able to measure how far from it you are.
“Know thyself.” Do you? Really?
What’s your vision? It still sounds like a bumper sticker but it is the most profound question you’ll ever be asked.
#journalingalife