Vachon Imagined

Things do not become important because of what they are.

They become important because of what we say is happening.

Yet what is really happening?

Life.

Life is happening.

And within life, death is contained.

The two are not enemies. They are partners. They move together beyond our judgments of good and bad, success and failure, gain and loss, bringing forth the physical world exactly as it is.

Once this is seen, contradictions become less frustrating and more revealing.

The person who says they hate attention may secretly crave it.

Not because they love attention itself, but because they were wounded by it.

The person who rejects love may be the one who longs for it most.

The person who condemns power may be struggling with their own relationship to it.

The contradiction is often the clue.

It points toward the hidden life underneath the story.

Because it is rarely the thing we think it is.

It is not the attention.

It is not the money.

It is not the achievement.

It is not the approval.

It is the life we hope those things will give us.

And once a person sees this, something remarkable happens.

They can lay that life down.

The life they thought they needed.

The identity they fought to protect.

The story they spent years defending.

And in the empty space, another life appears.

One that asks nothing of them.

One that is already present.

One that does not need to be earned.

As a writer, I encounter this often.

My best ideas rarely arrive when I am trying to think of them.

They come when I am washing dishes.

Driving.

Walking.

Staring out a window.

Doing absolutely nothing.

An image appears.

A sentence arrives.

A connection reveals itself.

Writing does not feel manufactured.

It feels received.

The invisible becomes visible, and then disappears back into the invisible once more.

Creation moves this way.

Life moves this way.

We spend much of our time believing that what matters is what we are doing.

Yet some of the most important things happen when we stop doing altogether.

Everyone dies.

And death has a way of stripping away every argument.

Every status symbol.

Every possession.

Every identity.

It reminds us that much of what we considered urgent was never truly important.

The tragedy is not that death teaches this lesson.

The tragedy is that many of us wait until death is standing at the door before we are willing to learn it.

By then, there is little time left to live what we have finally discovered.

Life was never hiding from us.

It was here the entire time.

Waiting beneath the stories we told about it.