Love is Shared Vision

Shared vision, simply put, is being on the same pathway to the same destination.  Several years ago my then husband took out the broken-down back fence separating our yard from the alley.  The level of the earth in the alley was two feet higher than the level of the yard, so we decided to replace the fence with a brick retaining wall.  We picked out the bricks and I helped him measure the length and the height to determine just how many bricks we needed.  When we had the bricks, he started right in on the retaining wall, but to my disappointment, he wasn’t building the wall from the yard level, abutting the earth wall left from the previous fence, he was building the wall on top of the edge of earth, in the alley.  In my kindest way I explained that we wanted the bricks to hold back that wall of earth, that’s what a retaining wall is.  I pointed out that we had measured from the yard level up to the alley level. I explained that a free-standing wall on top of the dirt was not stable and when a good storm came along the bricks would shift and tumble as the ground underneath washed away.  All to no avail.  We did not share the same vision of the project.  I washed my hands of it all, figuring I would have to re-do it myself the next time he was out of town.  He worked three days on it, getting 20-30 feet done, and then one day, without saying a word to me, he started over, building it in the place where I had envisioned it.  He did a beautiful job.  I have puzzled over how our visions of a simple little retaining wall could have been so drastically different, and how we could have done better at having a shared vision.  More on this tomorrow…