A kite let loose still moves. It still looks alive in the air. But it goes wherever the wind decides, and it ends up far from home. That is the danger in a life without a vision: not that you stop, but that your direction quietly becomes someone else’s — “the forces that be.”

The quiet claim underneath is that no one hands you a vision. “A vision is not given, it’s created, by you.” There is no one to wait for. You make the picture of your life, or the wind makes it for you.

And the picture is what lets you see clearly — where you’ve come from, where you are, where you’re going. Innocent’s small paradox is that the thing you imagine is what finally opens your eyes.