When I was a kid, I sat down criss-cross-apple-sauce on the grass in the backyard under the pecan tree and built little huts and villages out of grass clippings and pecans. 

My world was alive with wonder and adventure, and it didn’t matter that the wind would blow them away tomorrow.

There in that moment was joy: the process of catching a vision, and entering the dream space where vision and reality meet. Each house, each village, another opportunity for fairy vision to light upon me, fill me and pass through my heart into the world.

But history has run its course, from pre-biblical Plato to postmodern Derrida, and the dark waters of doubt and materialism have all but crushed this child-like definition of vision.

Georgian author Flannery O’Connor spent her short life lamenting this, often in the tone of a biblical prophet:

“Not long ago I was reading the work of a European writer named Romano Guardini and I came across the sentence, ‘The roots of the eye are in the heart,’ and I was struck again with the complication of the act of seeing. We live in a world where people believe that if you have 20-20 vision, you can see all there is to see. But this is not a civilized attitude …”

Vision requires the eyes, yes, but it is far more than that. What good is the camera lens without the film?

Franklin D. Roosevelt saw that vision is a combination of both, the spiritual and the physical. He said, “Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground.”

Vision is both an ethereal awareness and an earthy commitment.

It is both because without awareness, we develop tunnel vision, losing perspective and purpose, floundering on the rocky shores of doubt and defeat.

Without commitment, we soar into the heavens, completely impractical and impotent, as useless and detached from reality as a fairy.

Vision is difficult because it is not an achievement, it is a muscle. It is the ability to become child-like again, to see the opportunities instead of the obstacles.

It is messy, unclear, and often ambiguous. Vision can’t be pinned down like a game of darts.

It is your greatest calling, your life’s work, your heart’s relentless, burning desire.

Whatever it is, you must find it and then you must choose it.

And you must choose it again and again, exercising the muscle. If the biggest vision the muscle can produce is for the next five minutes, so be it.

There is a day coming when vision will sweep us off our feet, where every day is inspired by a relentless, burning desire. But until then, vision is calling for us to sit in the grass in the shade of the pecan tree and see what kind of creations the old pecan shells throw at us.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Adam Setser is a financial advisor with Kerrigan Capital and Risk Management, 3543 North Crossing Circle, Valdosta. He can be reached at (229) 588-8448.

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