What has never been
You can see a lot from the 30th floor, but it’s not the same level of detail you will experience on the street. (Mexico City, April 2023)
Well, that’s a little sad.
When I open the Delta app on my phone, I have no upcoming trips.
It feels strange that after all of that planning, anticipating, and finally, traveling, everything is over and done.
It was a lot of work to figure out how everything would fit together, and it didn’t all come together perfectly.
In one instance, my husband and I set out for San Francisco together, but we planned for him to return to Maine alone while I continued on to North Carolina. We were going to get a hotel in Boston for one night before going our separate ways.
However, when our arrival time in Boston went from 9 PM to 3 AM, we had to reevaluate. He choose to take an Uber to New Hampshire to pick up our vehicle, while I decided to spend the night at Logan Airport since I would be flying out only a few hours later.
Cinematically, a mouse crossed my path just as I was trying to figure out where to lay down to sleep. That made the whole situation a lot less appealing, but I made it through.
And now, even though I spent several hours traveling today, I’m already thinking about what’s next. With no weddings on the horizon, the only trips we’ll take are the ones we choose. They won’t happen unless we conceive of them and bring them into being.
Even though not every travel experience works out exactly as you envisioned, it’s a really cool feeling when it does: when you’re actually doing the thing you imagined and it feels the way you hoped.
And that is one of my favorite things about travel: It’s an opportunity to practice making a very specific vision a reality.
This is a skill that I’ve been working hard to develop in other areas of my life as well. In particular, as a business owner, I can visualize a specific product or service I’d like to create, and then carry out the steps to bring it into being.
Or I can challenge myself to see, in my mind’s eye, my my ideal clients — the ones I haven’t met. What are their traits and qualities? How am I helping them? What does our success together look like and feel like?
Periodically, in my work, I find myself at a crossroads similar to the one I’m at with my travel: “No upcoming trips.” When all of the cycles are complete, I wonder what’s next and how to proceed.
And just as with my travel experiences, things don’t (and won’t) exist unless I see the possibilities first. Therefore, I spend a lot of time in visualization, constructing the future in my mind before I take the steps to bring it into being.
Indeed, this type of visualization is, in a way, inviting this future into being. The less familiar that future is — the more of a stretch this possible future represents relative to the experiences I’ve already had — the trickier it is to catch the vision out of the corner of my eye and hang onto it.
Seeing clearly what has never been — especially when it requires ignoring or bypassing what is — is the hardest part of making it happen. But once I’ve done it, I’ve got a head start. Often, the practical actions happen faster and more smoothly than expected as a result of all of the visualization work on the front end.
Lately, I’m spending time playing with some new projects and, once again, giving a lot of effort to visualization. I’m excited to get started, but also not clear yet on what is to be done. Thus, I’ll keep playing in my head for now.
On my last night in Mexico City last week, there was a Norteño band playing out on the street in the Roma Norte neighborhood, complete with guitar, accordion, electric bass, and harmony vocals. There was no way I could have predicted such a rich, beautiful cultural moment, but I had done everything I could to make space for it.
That is, I was never going to have that experience unless I booked the trip to Mexico City. I was willing to put the work in to have experience something beyond sitting on my couch at home. I had to picture it in my mind, and then I had to take the action to make it happen. It paid off; it pretty much always does.
Similarly, if I want to make something happen in my career or my personal life, I can work to hold it in my minds’ eye until my vision for it is so clear that it feels real. From there, I can make it real.
So now, what’s next? Figuring that out is a worthy endeavor. Sometimes, it leads nowhere, but sometimes it goes far beyond where you ever believed you could go: into expansion, into possibility, and into growth.
