December 1^st, 2010 is rent day and I wrote my last rent check for this year.  Seeing the date with the passing of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and beginning the preparations for December festivities and more time off, I reflected upon the events of the past year. 

On my desk is a picture I took of a special tree in Vancouver that I saw everyday for three years.  One day the tree looked different.  Its limbs were decorated with an assortment of clocks and watches.  It reminded me of the Pink Floyd’s song, “Time”:  the shrill of the alarm bell then the chimes and ticking seconds… “Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day…Fritter and wastes the hours in an offhand way.”

This picture is a reminder of how I fritter away the minutes in an hour; how readily I take for granted that the sun comes up and around everyday bringing in a new day, a new week and a new year.  During the reprieve from the routine of working in the office and doing chores to maintain life, I finally acted on a project I’ve been considering for sometime.  I started my “dream board”/”vision board”.

A dream board is a collage of images and phrases/words that represents a visual map of your goals and dreams.  Sunday, I sat on the living room floor, and it was a patchwork of pictures, captions and words I had cut out from magazines and other periodicals.   I started late in the afternoon and thought I’d be finished by the time I got to bed.   That was 3 days ago, and I’ve been up early yesterday and today putting together my dream board.  It’s not as simple a task as I had thought.  Once I got my heart and imagination into it I was immersed in more possibilities than I originally started out with; and also further introspection and clarity on what it is I really want to create.

I don’t have nearly enough pictures to express my dreams, and I’m still collecting catalogues, and I have asked the mailroom guy at the office to recycle the old magazines my way.  As I flip through pages of advertising, articles and cartoons of magazines I’ve developed a keener sense of screening what magazines best reflect who I think I am and where I want to be.  An hour intended for collecting pictures is not enough.  I am building, taking down, re-shaping and molding my dream board.

This morning I woke up at 1 o’clock in the morning, put on some coffee and thought of putting an hour into the dream board.  By the time I’ve exhausted my resources of pictures and my being it was already 5 o’clock and the phone alarm goes off in a half hour.  I set it forward to 7:30.  I rested and felt elated.  My half-sleep state brought up more rich images.  I got up again and got through my day with surprisingly little fatigue and I look forward to going back to building more layers to my dream board.

I love the work.  It engages every fiber of my being down to my core and provokes me to poke the smoking embers of the fire within to a flame.  When the flame is exhausted I know I will be empty like that feeling after a long 8 hour hike – summiting and coming down.  Ah…I did it and how much I saw and learned.   

I created a dream board for a character I was playing in one of my acting classes.  It was shortcut way of getting to know this imaginary character.  The exercise opened up images, in a visceral sense, the dreams, fears, hope, joy sorrows and inspirations of that human being that was a part of me too.  It really stretched and strengthened the “empathetic heart”.

The dream board communicates the words and thoughts of our visions, and it’s an effective tool for planting the seeds of change in our subconscious.  By the way, I put the picture of that tree with the clocks and watches in the middle of my dream board.

In closing I want to quote a visionary…

“Carefully watch your thoughts, for they become your words. Manage and watch your words, for they will become your actions. Consider and judge your actions, for they have become your habits. Acknowledge and watch your habits, for they shall become your values. Understand and embrace your values, for they become your destiny.”

Mahatma Gandhi