Increasing your Vision: A Growth of Self

What is your eyesight like?  Do you have to wear glasses?  What about contact lenses?  Do you ever struggle to see at night or when walking into the bright daylight from a dimly lit corridor?  Are you reflecting on your sight or vision?

When I looked "Vision" up in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, several types of definitions came up. Interestingly enough, the first two definitions do not relate at all to the sense.  They define to vision as, "something seen in a dream, trance or ecstasy," or, "the act or power of imagination."  So not only is vision related to the sense of sight, but also can be something that is not really there but imagined.

Today, in church, our pastor began to speak about this very topic (thus why I am writing about it now).  The sermon was entitled, "How is your vision?"  The overall point of his sermon was that you cannot reach a point in life without knowing where that point falls.  The next question may be how is that point determined?  I guess that depends entirely on how your Vision is.

In other words, you have to set your goals of growth in life, because no one will do it for you.  And once you achieve the first goals, you must set yourself higher goals.  Without somewhere to go in life, how can we propel forward?  Take, for example, a student who is graduating high school.  Perhaps they have set a goal to complete college.  In college, there are several sub-goals: passing courses, tests, the long nights of studying.  On that day when they walk across the stage, that goal is achieved.  They now have to decide what their next goal is.

Perhaps they will decide that they have had enough school and they want to go into the workplace.  Perhaps they want to further their education and go onto a Master's program.  We cannot move forward in life without knowing where we have come from and, more importantly, where we are going.  Certainly, sometimes we struggle to determine what path we should go down.  Especially in our youth, that is to be expected.  It is a part of learning what our Vision is.

Like everything in life, Vision of life, growth and future is something that is ever changing and ever evolving.  Today, my Vision for my life is much different from when I was in, say, 3rd grade!  Especially when, in 3rd grade, I was planning on becoming a nun.  But that is the beauty of childhood and having supportive adults to surround those children.  Children, you see, have very blurry Vision.  They daydream and change constantly what they "want to be when they grow up."  The beauty of this is they are free to explore the possibilities while the adults can help wrangle those energies in.

We all play a crucial part in one another's Visions.  We must all support one another because we cannot reach our Visions by ourselves.  Many pitfalls befall across our paths.  However, with Faith and the people around us supporting who we are and where we are going, we can never fall short of our goals or our Visions.  Afterall, we set our Visions and goals, but we all need help to achieve them.

Betrayed by the Senses

My mom posted this on her Facebook and tagged my baby sister in it.  It is so true that we often coordinate sounds, smells or touch with specific feelings.  I recall a radio commercial for a soda (Sierra Mist Natural) that goes like this.  An announcer comes over the air waves and begins discussing about how your ears can deceive you.  You hear a can open and she says something like, "This is the refreshing sound of Sierra Mist Natural, a soda with no artificial flavors and sugar."  You hear another can open and the announcer asks you if it sounds the same.  She then goes on to say that it isn't, that it is a soda with artificial flavorings and sweetners.

Consider when you touch something how you commonly associate it with soft, hard, prickly, sharp or whatever other texture may commonly come to mind.  If you were to touch something blindfolded, do you think you could directly tell what exactly it is?  Or would you only really be able to tell what the texture is?  For example, could you tell a stuffed animal from animal fur?  Or would they both be soft?

The five senses

Sounds is another amazing thing.  How often do we hear things that make us think of other associations we have with that sounds.  Such as in the post above, maybe you hear a pan frying and you may immediately think it is bacon cooking.  You may hear a voice and not be able to tell who it belongs to.

My favorite sense has to be taste/smell.  I love how I can discuss something, such as grapes, and suddenly, it seems as though I am tasting the grapes at that very moment.  Senses are such a wonderful thing, even if they can be deceiving at times.  My sister at one point in time asked an interesting questions to myself and our baby sister.  She asked, "If you had to lose either your sense of hearing or your sense of sight, which would you choose?"

To her surprise, my sister and I both chose to lose our sense of sight.  She said it was dumb, that if you lose that, you can't see anything.  But my baby sister and I are very musically inclined.  We both said the same thing: we couldn't imagine a world without sound, without music, without the voices of our loved ones.  She responded that there are surgeries that can bring the hearing back.  There are those that can bring sight back too, we countered.  What would you do?  Would you rather live in a World of Darkness or a World of Silence?

Well, I am logging off of this until tomorrow.  There is a man sitting in the chair next to mine and a little boy playing in his room.  I have worked a full week and it is time to relax.  I will enjoy the sense I have and celebrate them every day.  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and embrace the week as it comes, good, bad, ugly or otherwise.  Remember that today is the only one you with have.  Enjoy "La Vie" as it comes.