Vision: from videre – ‘to see.’
I’ve enjoyed a very satisfying hour or so making a personal vision board. A daydreaming session. Notes and images related to what life might look like, for me and for others, in the course of 2024. Two things are particularly striking about my easily assembled collection. The first, unsurprisingly – for a vision board! – it flags up a host of things I want to see. The second standout is that almost every aspiration, every dream, conjures up images of other people. Soft images. There’s gentleness, hope and quietness involved in this vision, alongside some of the busier, more energetic, more musical, somewhat noisier, encounters. I realise that, perhaps especially at this moment in world history, I long for the kinder, gentler, quieter elements of life. I wrote a few days ago about my reading David Brooks’ How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen – wherein he cites a pure piece of ‘vision board’ knowing from D H Lawrence. I’m drawn to it again and again: I hear my vision board murmuring ‘softly, softly’ …
Whoever wants life must go softly towards life, softly as one would go towards a deer and fawn that are nestling under a tree. One gesture of violence, one violent assertion of self-will and life is gone … but with quietness, with an abandon of self-assertion and a fullness of the deep true self one can approach another human being, and know the delicate best of life, the touch
D H Lawrence
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
What a thing to see.
What a wonderful vision: to ‘know the delicate best of life …’
.