“Where there is no vision, the people perish” – Proverbs 29:18
I am one of those unfortunate people that has to rely on a pair of spectacles to see things clearly and go about my daily routine. Every so often, I have to remove the glasses and give the lenses a good clean due to dust or smudges.
Before I go to sleep at night, I take my glasses off and put them on my side table. When I wake up in the morning and put them back on, there are smudges on the lenses from the previous day or evening. If I put the glasses on without cleaning the lenses, my vision is impaired by the grime or dirt on the lens, my vision isn’t crystal clear.
Our minds are like this. We see the world through the “spectacles” of our minds. It is this vision that dictates how we respond to life and its challenges. It is this vision that gives us the requisite clarity we need to achieve the goals we have. This vision, however, can become blurred and smudged by negative attitudes and events that happen during the day, impairing our capacity to see clearly and to perform at our best. Even more interesting is that we get so accustomed to these negative thoughts and attitudes that we often times become blind to the very obvious blemishes in our thinking.
When I remove my glasses and hold them up to a light, I can see the marks and smudges quiet clearly. The only way for us to solve our lack of vision is to take a step back and hold our minds up to the light of truth by honestly reflecting on what and how we are thinking.
We often don’t move forward in our lives or reach our potential because we wake up daily and see the world through yesterdays eyes with its negative outlook and baggage, with the smudges of yesterday. What if you were able to wake up each day and consciously “clean” the spectacles of your mind, starting each day anew with fresh perspective and vision, starting the day with clarity, removing the negative thoughts and expectations from the previous day.
After thinking about things in this way, I now hold my lenses up to the light each morning when I wake up and clean off any old blemishes from the previous day before I even put the spectacles on. This is something we should all be doing with our minds everyday.
Don’t let your yesterday blur the vision you need for today.
