In my online salon, a member talked about diversity in food and showed me a good example of creating a vision from her own experience. When you read this, you will understand that vision is something that starts with an individual's thoughts and feelings.
We have an online salon every Wednesday night. A university girl who has been a participant in the online salon since its beginning has an interesting vision. She wants to raise the recognition of food diversity. At first, I didn't understand what she was talking about, but when I saw the food intake guidelines for Canada and Japan, the concept came into my head.
Food gauide in Candada
https://liannephillipson.com/food-guide-2019/
Food guide in Japan
https://www.maff.go.jp/j/balance_guide/kakudaizu.html
What do you think when you see the two graphs. Because of presentation, Japan looks like eating more carbohydrates than Canada, but when you break them down, there's not that much difference. The Canadian guidelines are written in English and presented in two dimensions, so take a look here. These guidelines are a quarter of carbs, a quarter of protein and half of other vegetables and fruits. When I first saw the Japanese graph, I thought they were going to make much more carbs, but this is just because they use a 3-dimensional graph, which makes it look bigger. This is off-topic, but I thought we should be careful about using 3D graphs.
The key difference is that the Canadians refer to it as protein, while the Japanese refer to it as meat food. Equally, the Canadian side says "your choice of beverage", while the Japanese side specifies milk. To begin with, the graph on the Japanese side says to take dairy products. The reason this is a problem is that the Japanese guidelines ignore the fact that there are vegetarians and vegans in the country. I am sure not many people in Japan have heard of veganism. Vegans, for one reason or another, choose not to take dairy products, so they don't have the choice to eat them.
She said the reason why she wanted more people to understand this food diversity is because of her internship experience. When she did an internship at a hotel in Taiwan last year, she found out that many people have restrictions on what they eat for various reasons, not just religious differences.
The timing was just right as I'll be speaking about vision at an online workshop in Africa next month. A vision is a "thought" or "will" that is made up of very personal things, and there are as many thoughts as there are people. It should not be a simple brainstorming exercise to find the "right" vision. A vision that everyone could agree on would be a mundane vision that is not that interesting to begin with. If we state a vision in the face of others, we will look for the right 'idea' and come up with only the most mundane goals. A vision is a fantasy thought that comes out of an individual's desire to do this, no matter what people say, this is what we need to do.
The vision set out by the Japanese university student above is a good example of how her personal experience of internship in Taiwan led her to create a vision.
Your life is your own, so whatever life you choose to live, it is, in a sense, the right life. That's what vision is all about, so if you want to find it, you have to find that thrusting thought from your experience of "you had to do". Sometimes it's good to stop for a moment and think about vision in your life.