Day 19 of 100 Days of Blogging: Visionary Patience
Today I’m meditating on my role as a visionary. I say this not from a place of ego but from a place of self affirmation and years of self work and personal development. There are innumerable timelines of possibilities if we can afford ourselves the ability to believe. Who would’ve thought in the early 2000’s for example, that Our Lady Beyonce, a black woman form Texas, would be the patron Queen of contemporary culture?
I think alternatively, it’s a fact. I love to have time and space to dabble in the paradoxes and margins of what is possible in imagining a more just, pleasurable, and egalitarian world. I don’t think this is idealism, I just think the pace at and scale at which the changes occur is hard for us in our humanity to process.
On the surface, a transformative visionary energy sounds great and just the thing we need to shift our world into manifestations of a different kind of earth. The shadow side of a visionary charge, is having the stamina to deconstruct your ego and nurture yourself in patience with the unknowns between the present and the path of next right actions towards major transformation and welcoming the naysayers with loving kindness.
Often when I am in a state of visionary inspiration, I am met with skepticism, and the cognitive limitations of the people with whom I do work or am in relationship with. Other people’s limiting beliefs though are not my business nor my problem. Knowing and believing this and being able to respond to, rather than react to scarcity mindsets, is easier said than done in the truest sense. What I’m slowly beginning to practice is a belief in myself and my capacity to do things in an entirely different way than they’ve been done historically. This takes a great deal of ego work, because I’m learning that when I move on my visions from a place of egotistical self righteousness, the embedded energy is one of fearful combativeness rather than generative and infectious inspiration. This is larger than me, though it starts with me knowing and loving myself.
I am envisioning a new society where the most vulnerable and marginalized people are invested in and nurtured to understand that their humanity is non-negotiable. I will work tirelessly to build systems built on the principles of delivering basic human needs and rights to everyone by allowing people to have access to the tools that affirm their right to self determination. I believe that we can teach ourselves to understand that when we heal ourselves, we heal the world. When we don’t move from a place of fear, we can more fluidly reach the outer limits of our potential. When people are invested in with tools to develop themselves and their own potential, the collective benefits.
I am dreaming and acting on creating communities where everyone’s lived experiences, stories, and knowledge is respected and valued as a unique gift. What I am learning is that as I walk along my path to actualizing these visions, I am consistently met with insecure energy that pushes against the boundaries of the alternative kinds of systems and communities I envision. I see that when people act in negative and insecure ways that could be interpreted as belittling my potential, I instead choose to see this behavior as an act of fear and insecurity, and I am tasked with shifting this energy as a true shamanic magician. I am being asked to grow out my ability to patiently stay steadfast in nurturing my own capacity to enact change without the need for exterior affirmations. This is hard. Extremely hard. Incredibly challenging. Humans have an evolutionarily engrained impetus to seek in-group affirmation for safety, so going against the grain can feel counterintuitive to an aspect of human nature. But manifesting the type of communities and systems I envision, will actually generate more authentic social cohesiveness, so I have to get so focused on those visions that I can taste them as a reality to counteract the lack of in-group affirmations in the present. This also is the time where I must step into my charge as a visionary and acknowledge the discomfort of the solitary nature of certain points in this path. To create something better, something entirely new and more generative than our current systems, patience and self affirmation are imperative.
When I confidently see my ability to shift energy around me by responding to rather than reflecting back energy that doesn’t serve my vocation to build a new world, the karmic spiral responds in kind. But patience is the virtue at the key of staying true to visionary intentions. And also, everyone has visionary potential, I am not unique in my visionary capacity but rather perhaps more intuitively predisposed than some at the present moment, to dabble in visionary cognitive spaces. Believing that past and present circumstances of turmoil and violence are a perpetual steady-state is a trauma response. I think that if we heal ourselves and open up more internal space to vision and dream with more attentive focus, this will fractal out into encouraging those around us to do the same.
I’m transmuting anxious future-casting energy into an unbounded visionary potential. And if I don’t succeed, at the end of watching the movie that is the story of my life, I won’t wonder what would have happened if I had tried to manifest visions of a different more loving and compassionate world. I’ll at least know that I tried my damndest to touch the lives of those around me with the energy of believing that my relationships are a microcosm of the world I imagine.
