Balancing Your Future With Your Present

Last week I wrote a blog post about the importance of having vision for your life. I got a really good response from readers, which was great. A few people commented on the post, suggesting that while vision for your future is important, it's a greater priority to be at peace with your life and enjoy the 'moment'. This is a sentiment that I fully support. If you can't enjoy where you are in the moment then you're on a one way road to ruin.

Vision for the future and a recognition of what you have now are complimentary, there should be a balance between the two. A balance where you strive to meet your ambitions whilst enjoying your life in the moment. Without vision, your life can become stale, and without an appreciation of the moment, your life becomes hollow.

I mentioned before that I am a carer for my wife, who has a chronic illness. When illness impacts your life, like it does ours, it can become easy to put your life on hold. For the longest time, we did this exact thing. We, in effect, were stuck in a place where we were waiting for our lives to begin.

There's an element of wisdom in this. You have to be realistic about what you can do when sickness has such a massive impact on you. You get to a point, however, when you realise that you can't sit back and wait, for years, for your situation to improve, when it might never change. We learnt that we can't just look to the future, we had to enjoy where we were at present.

We work hard to strike the balance between having vision for the future and enjoying the present. To maintain this balance, even the simplest things can make all the difference. Me and my wife have a vision board in our house and then make sure that at least once a week we have a 'date day' where we focus on each other in that moment.

What do you do to make sure you strike that critical balance between having a vision for the future, and making the most of every single moment?

Vision Casting

One of the principles which I have intentionally adopted over the last 12 months has been to always have vision for my life. I think that it's important to always have a vision of what you want your life to be. I try to have both long term, and short term vision, which I'm always going back to and re-assessing.

Before I got married, we first set out a vision for what we wanted our marriage to be. I did the same thing when I started this blog, and when I began fighting against my mental illness.

There are two reasons why I think that having vision is important to having a great life.

1) I believe that people with great vision change history, and that people without are doomed to repeat it.

2) Without vision you don't know your destination, let alone the road which will lead you there.

Vision should be flexible. Realistically, you can't predict the future, all you can do is give yourselves goals. Those goals might have to change if circumstances call for it. The important thing is that you replace them for something else.

Vision should be achievable, but audacious. There's no use in setting yourself unachievable goals, but at the same time don't limit yourself. My visions for this blog is simple, to reach the world. That means that I want people all over the world to read it. This vision, is however, long term. I don't expect to do that in a year, or even two. My Vision is wildely audacious, but I'm giving myself an achievable time frame to do it in.

Vision should be divided between the short term and long term. Obviously reaching the world with my writing is a long term goal, but, I also always have short term goals set. For example, at the moment, my goal is to sit an exam on the 13th of May. Before that, my vision was to start regaining control over my life. By having short term vision I'm able to not only keep myself moving forward, but also, I'm regularly achieving things. I spoke about the importance of recognising achievements in an earlier post.

I know that so many of my readers have amazing potential. I'm frankly excited to hear what some of you are going to achieve.  I want to know what your vision is and, if you don't have any, why not?