Imagine Your Life into Being

Purposeful Wanderings - Bradford L. Glass - November 2025

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“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people and assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”  

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This is #3 in a five-part series on walking your authentic path in life, a path that offers peace, meaning, well-being, connectedness and freedom. To walk this path is to free yourself from the grasp of old lessons, so you can honor your truth, instead of fighting so hard to be someone else’s. The steps: accept, discover, envision, manifest, sustain. 

If you engaged in depth with step #1 (its message: “you’re living someone else’s story”), you’re now more resilient to life, and your thinking is marked by greater clarity and non-judgment. If you then engaged with step #2 (its message: “find your own story; it’s inside you”), you likely discovered that unique-to-you “seed,” waiting to express itself through how you live your life. (If you didn’t engage with these two, it’s not too late) And if you’ve gained both clarity and personal felt experience here, you’re ready to take a step onto the path of your own truth.

Step 3: Envision: Tomorrow hasn’t been invented yet; you are its inventor. But if you use the same thinking today you used yesterday, then your tomorrows may look alarmingly like yesterday. Why not, right? But with growing conscious awareness of your true self, a new tomorrow is possible … always there, previously invisible. But how do you become this? Old thinking may tell you it’s impossible, so you revert to old ways. Old thinking may tell you to “make” it happen as you’ve done for years (maybe decades). Neither will take you there … simply because both use the same thinking that created today! The message: “nurture your seed into being by envisioning it as being so.” Envisioning uses conscious awareness, not force or judgment, to shift your thinking.

That same old thinking may see this idea as fantasy, but an analogy shows how and why it works. When you build a house, you get plans, materials, help – then make the house. But when you tend a garden, you create conditions conducive to growth – water, soil, sunlight. You don’t “make” roses grow; they do fine on their own. Same in life’s journey; you don’t “make yourself change.” You create conditions conducive to change; change happens naturally, on its own, when conditions are right. How you nurture such conditions is with regular practice of allowing innate capacities – not old skills/rules/lessons – to light your path. Envisioning is one such capacity. As you intentionally imagine your life as an expression of the unique self discovered in step #2, you create energy inside you, energy that draws you into its possibility. This is far different from the energy needed to push you there. [This shift in energy is the key ingredient in sustaining meaningful change … despite what old thinking tells you!] Envisioning also creates a “memory of the future” – another energy shift – so, as you take even a first step into its possibility, you won’t feel scared off by the unknown. By nurturing conditions where change flourishes naturally, your inner truth replaces old thinking. “Possibility consciousness” fills the space created by the release of old beliefs. 

Think of a vision as a “possibility to live into,” not an “expectation to live up to.” It’s a big picture, a movie … not a promise or a plan. (Planning is for cleaning closets.) And because it’s “just a movie” and not a plan, it doesn’t feel scary, like other unknowns. Envisioning a future that expresses your truth brings rational and emotional together, which creates meaning. And meaning is what evokes action, with little effort. So, create a vision of a life you’d love, and you’ll be ready to manifest it … in Step #4 (its message: “try something out” … as if it were already so.)

A key aspect of the envisioning process is what I call its objective separateness – the ability to step out of “this” reality so as to imagine a new one. It’s how you nurture your future into being. In doing so, however, you’ll likely notice how “old thinking” tells you how silly this is, that it’s a waste of your precious time, and you “should get back to work.” I say this because what I’m suggesting is opposite what we’ve been taught – knowing, planning, trying, doing, measuring, comparing. We’re so used to that struggle that it’s easy to fall back into it, even without realizing it … or realizing its futility. This is why intentional regular practice is crucial – focused on creating a life you love – in your mind, by envisioning it as so, using imagination, not force. Conscious awareness is the key. Remember, a vision is not a plan for the future, but a way to give your dreams energy and space to manifest.

Exercise: Envision your future as a movie. Set aside 10-15 minutes of personal quiet time each day for a week, then maybe once a week thereafter. In your mind, create a picture of a future you’d love, free from all of today’s struggles and constraints. (It’s an exercise in imagining a thriving future; why would you imagine struggles in it?) Imagine yourself living your dreams, evoking the heart, soul and spirit of the “you” you discovered in Step #2, yet perhaps have never known before. Imagine where and how you live, how you relate with others, your community of love and support, making a great living doing exactly what your heart and soul love most. (Listen for those pesky voices in your head that try to tell you this is all impossible! If it helps, tell them to shut up.) As you continue this exercise regularly, mold it into a full-scale “movie” in your mind, adding details as they come to you. Creating, then continually replaying, a bold vision of a desired future causes the mind to believe it … as if it were already so. This generates energy, energy that draws you toward it. Imagine what it would it feel like to truly be in this place.

As you continue to replay your movie, fall in love with it. You need sell only one copy – to yourself!  This process works anywhere – for a lifetime, job, project, developing a new competency, even having a conversation. Its power is rooted in acceptance (clarity & non-judgment) from Step #1 and self-knowledge gained in Step #2. These let you embrace the “objective separateness” to break from today’s reality so your imagination can do its thing.

Life Lessons from Nature: Seems that at the root of the struggle we experience, both individually and societally, is our [learned] penchant for control – forcing outcomes, knowing answers, eliminating uncertainty, being right. Seems we might instead listen to what nature has been “teaching” us – quietly, for billions of years – of the futility of our ways … and of her model of “what could be” … which is right in our own back yards … and that we are desperately trying to find … by looking somewhere else!  Here’s what nature knows, and embraces, so very well:

If everything were certain, there’d be no opportunity, no need for creativity, no such thing as possibility. BORING! But … were we to embrace uncertainty and chaos – as does nature – we’d open to exactly the possibility that so eludes us, trapped as we are in its opposite.  And, like so much of the possibility our lives hold, all it takes to step into this new world is conscious awareness. But, again, believing we already are so aware, we’d likely deny this.

Nature seizes the possibility of life’s innate uncertainty and responds by creating … something old, something new. It keeps stepping into uncertainty with its “anything is possible” theme; then, with each creation, it stops, listens to feedback (an information flow inherent in all living systems that tells it how things are going) and takes a next step … based on what it learns, NOT on a plan with an outcome planned ahead of time. How limiting to creativity would that be!!  Plus … this entire process makes its own order – out of chaos (that’s order, not control).

If we had learned that life works like nature (because we are part of nature, not separate from it), we’d not spend our precious energy trying to control the uncontrollable, but instead step into the possibility offered by each of life’s [uncertain] moments, and just notice. The possibility we seek would just “show up,” out of the void we create with our awareness.  Our obsession with power is a reflection of our powerlessness. Our true power lies in making small changes that create a big difference.  And we do that with awareness, attention, envisioning … not force.

Book of the month: Courageous Dreaming, by Alberto Villoldo. An oldie but goodie. “You can have what you want, or you can have all the reasons why you can't.” Yes, thoughts drive actions, but if your [largely-unconscious] thoughts are about trying to fix what’s “wrong,” there are no thoughts left to see that opportunity lies in every situation, waiting to be noticed. If you shift perception to a higher level, you can tap into your courage and imagine a world that isn’t beleaguered with issues – then dream it into being. Many levels of consciousness are available to us for navigating our lives. If we’re unaware these levels exist, we can’t use them.  The levels briefly: taking action; connecting with the world; choosing our unique journey; seeing all as one. [Mostly, we’re stuck – because of lack of awareness – in the “action” stage.} “Only when we recognize that we aren’t special can we truly become original.” We do this by being conscious of our level of consciousness.  Hmm.