We are having another Warriors of Love Retreat this weekend, and we have been asked to revisit our Life Vision. We are meant to score out of ten where each part of it lives. I realised I have not looked at it for over a year, and some of the areas clearly live around one and two out of ten. I was reading my friend Marc’s blog called 10 Ways to Write a Life Story Worth Living just before listening to the audio that made this request.

It begins as follows: When writing the story of your life, don’t let someone else hold the pen. Make conscious choices every day that align your actions with your values and your dreams, the way you live each day is a sentence in the story of your life. Each day, you choose whether the sentence ends with a period, a question mark, or an exclamation point.

Marc then lists ten ideas for writing a life story worth living:

1. Find a Passion That Makes You Come Alive.
2. Work Hard On That Passion.
3. Live happily in your own way.
4. Change your path when you must, but keep moving forward.
5. When the going gets tough, keep fighting.
6. Let go of the past and live consciously in the present.
7. Embrace new ideas, lessons, and challenges.
8. Appreciate the little things in life that mean a lot.
9. Live honourably through kindness.
10. Spend quality time with people you love.

I don’t agree with all of them but can see how they would help me realign my vision. What has society said about creating visions over time? Here are some of my favourite takes at it.

1. With all these things in place, your vision will be well lit throughout your life.

2. Taking actions to meet the goals of your vision also needs to be added: Never Going to Give You Up.

3. The passion for your vision makes it so much more transparent.

4. Remember to include all the things: All The Things She Said.

5. Your vision adds your true colours to your life.

6. There are millions of possible paths one could take up the mountain of life. You get to choose which one you take, and you can jump from one track to another if you run into a roadblock. The only mistake you can make is standing still: Stay With Me.

7. And what decision we make regarding your life vision creates the map for our lives, moment to moment.

8. The right doors will begin to open as soon as you create your vision: Break On Through.

9. A man who created a whole new world of entertainment with his vision, Walt Disney indeed executed his vision.

10. Imagine there’s…: Imagine.

11. Your vision lives in your heartspace.

12. Burchard cites surviving a car accident at age 19 as the inspiration for his core teaching questions: “Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?” His video about his story became a viral hit, with over 27 million views: Step In The Name Of Love.

13. What a great question when creating your vision, How can I be me?

14. You never know what will get you across the line, it may even be lemons: Mrs. Robinson.

15. Peter Senge is an American systems scientist who is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning. He is known as the author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990, rev. 2006). He has had a regular meditation practice since 1996 and began meditating with a trip to Tassajara, a Zen Buddhist monastery, before attending Stanford. He recommends meditation or similar forms of contemplative practice.

Marc empowers his article with this statement: Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs, and what every great story has, are characters who have come alive in the pursuit of something that inspires them.

The playlist today is very masculine in nature with only one offering from a woman. We begin with Rick Astley, then T.A.T.U. breaks up the men. The lucid tones of Sam Smith follow, then we go back a century to The Doors and John Lennon. R. Kelly is the penultimate track and we finish with The Lemonheads: Don’t Worry About Failure, You Only Have To Be Right Once.

One area in my life vision that is gaining strength is my ethos: Love and Respect for All – Everybody Included. Remember to add your email if you enjoy reading these blogs so that you receive them automatically. Until next time we meet, my dear friends.