Thoughts About the Power of Visualization

On New Year’s Day I like to go for a walk and reflect upon the 365 days that have passed and think about what I would like to do in the coming year. It was a perfect day for that kind of walk. A dense, milky fog cloaked the landscape creating a peaceful, almost otherworldly atmosphere in the familiar fields and meadows where I normally take my walks. The diffused whiteness encrusted the trees and grass in crystal snow and limited visibility to about 50 meters. Since I had no vistas upon which to gaze, I had no choice but look within as I made my way through the whiteness. I concluded that 2016 had been a positive and pivotal year for me and that I could attribute much of what I had learned, accomplished, and experienced to the habit of visualization.
 
Of course, there is nothing groundbreaking about this – the power of visualization is as old as mankind; countless works ranging from the philosophically profound to the trivially mundane have been written about the subject. At its most basic level, visualization is instinctual. It is an activity we all do, though at different levels of consciousness with varying levels of mastery and intensity. It is utterly fused to the strength and persistence of one’s imagination and, as such, steps outside the limits of rational and logical thought and challenges preconceived notions of reality by venturing into other realms such as faith and hope. This has been understood for centuries by people from different cultures and various walks of life, yet despite its ubiquity and apparent obviousness, the power and necessity of visualizing is often neglected or underutilized in our everyday lives. The conclusion I reached as I walked through the foggy field this morning was this – I can attribute most of what I accomplished, learned, and experienced this past year to my prior visualization of these events and circumstances. Put another way, whatever I achieved in the past year was more or less dependent on my ability to picture these achievements beforehand. The more consistently and intensely I imagined something, the more likely it was to manifest in reality.
 
Naturally, not every single thing I put my mind to bore fruit in the real world, but the things I focused on most keenly did strangely come to be. Among them are the purchase and remodeling of an old house in the Hungarian countryside (a culmination of much visualization over the course of many years), which has produced a mortgage-free existence (a lifelong goal finally achieved), as well as a secure and rewarding employment situation that allows me the pleasure of engaging in freelance work I enjoy. It is also comforting to know I will never again have to return to the teaching career I abandoned when I moved away from the United Kingdom a year-and-a-half ago. Together with this, I have finally managed to craft a daily routine that allows ample time for spiritual contemplation, physical recreation, and a plethora of intellectual pursuits. Put simply, my reality today was a mere pipe dream less than two years ago, yet here I am. 

However, as I considered these things I quickly understood that all of this was merely the groundwork for more significant accomplishments, which led me to the awareness of the things I had not expended any great effort visualizing, chief among them my further literary ambitions and my desire to engage with the world in a more meaningful and impactful way. After I emerged from the fields and made my way home, I decided to begin visualizing these things for the coming year. 

We shall see how successful my visualizing will be in the months to come.