Your Vision Board has a Problem
The question no one asks at the start of the new year.
In my dream last night I was given a million dollars but not before I went away to touch grass with my bare feet for five minutes.
I did not wake up with more zeroes in my bank account, but the lesson from the dream felt profound enough to share.
We have just crossed over arbitrary New Years (you know the one not tied to lunar cycles, or seasonal rhythms), but as weird as it is to try and reinvent yourself in the dead of winter, I have to confess I do love this time.
Something in me hungers for the reset, the plot twist, and piling our hopes on next year like unfolded laundry. It’s a time for vision-boarding and scribbling lists of resolutions that are only weeks away from feeling oppressive.
We do this all with the best of intentions. Already the gyms are filling with humans eager to exchange pains for gains.
But before we run away with our visions of grandeur, indulge me and Sci-fi/Fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin. In her short story, The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas, humans live splendid lives in a splendid city, but all of their riches and abundance hinge on the abject suffering of one small child. Because as Le Guin notes, no one would believe such a utopic vision without some sort of cost.
Whether the story is a scathing allegory of capitalist societies or something else, I will leave to the individual reader. But what I can say for our own lives is that for all the proposed good we aim to do, it is our bodies that pay the unaccounted for cost. Sickness, burnout, anxiety, depression, injury, illness. There is a cost to the riches of our current age.
In my dream, the money could not be spent until I had gone and touched some grass, even for just five minutes. The message from the deep was simple: You must connect with your animal earthy self before making these lofty decisions on how to direct your energy.
Too often I have been run by the western ideal of ends that always justify the means. “I can pay the highest price possible so long as I am promised some good in the end.” A healthy pension, retirement, followers, status, a hot body, a new career, a new car, love, power, a life free of problems, you fill in the blank. For a future heaven there is almost nothing we won’t sacrifice in the here and now. Personally, I have met many burnt out and bitter Christians and careerists who live this way.
But if life comes to us as a never ending series of puzzles, transitions, and open questions, we need to think and move differently. We have to stop sprinting and ignoring our aching knees. Sometimes pain is not weakness leaving the body, it’s just your body trying to get your attention.
Someone always has to pay the cost. On the individual scale, it is the body, on the systemic scale, it is the earth. So we have to start asking ourselves (and I mean the flesh and blood, sweet animal of your body) are these lofty ends really worth the means? What is the real cost of blind ambition? Of “popping off” at all costs? Are my dreams all in my head? Or are they in my body too? Because I can tell you right now you will need the latter.
There have undoubtedly been seasons in my life where pushing was the right move, and every cell o f me knew it. But increasingly I am re-asking the question, and along with literary dreamers like Le Guin, I am re-imagining what it would look like if I gave my body (or the earth) time and space to answer.
And now for some practical tips. (Many of these I learned from my friend Meki so shout out to her)
Slow down. “Your body movies at the speed of biology.” -Meki the myofascial magician. It doesn’t matter how fast our technology now moves, we are still so unexcapably human. And so if you can’t slow down? Oh honey you got bigger problems coming.
Try literally asking your body. Write down the word “yes” and the word “no” on two separate pieces of paper. Place them on the floor in front of you and ask yourself a question or make a statement. “I want to finally run that marathon this year.” Then step directly onto one of the answers and see how it feels in your body. Repeat the process but step onto the other answer and see how that feels. Did your breath come easier? Or did your jaw tighten and shoulders pull in. Where did your body open? and on which answer did it collapse? If you don’t feel anything at first, that is totally okay. A relationship with your body (like any relationship) is built slowly over time (see tip number one). The fact that you are asking and paying attention for answers will eventually loosen things up.
Pay attention to your dreams. Not just your waking ones. But the messages you are visited by each night as you sleep. Nature is anything but random, and she speaks to anyone brave enough to listen.
Happy New Year love bugs!
Stay tender,
Dakota
The Omelas framing for personal ambition is incredibly sharp. That question about whether the ends justify the means never gets asked enough, especially in hustle culture where burnout is treated like a badge of honor. I've watched friends destroy their health chasing goals that sounded impressive but weren't actualy aligned with what their bodies were telling them. The practical tip about stepping on yes/no papers to feel the bodily response is genius, turns the whole decisio-making process from cerebral to somatic.