Vachon Imagined

The best reason to do something is often the precise reason we don’t: fear.

Not fear of the thing itself, but fear of what it asks us to see.

I am naturally curious about stopping. Stopping long enough to notice my reaction before I obey it. Sometimes that means turning off a movie. Most recently, it meant turning off Poor Things. Not because it was bad, but because it challenged me to look at the world without immediately filtering it through moral judgment.

That is a frightening thing.

To simply say, “Yes, this is happening.”

Not, “This is good.”
Not, “This is bad.”
Not, “I approve.”
Not, “I condemn.”

Just this is.

It may be the most basic way of looking at reality, yet it is often the hardest. Without a ready-made compass of judgments, people can feel untethered. The mind wants certainty. It wants a villain, a victim, a side to stand on. It wants somewhere to place its discomfort.

When I turned the movie off, it wasn’t the movie I was rejecting. It was the wall I had run into inside myself.

A wall is an interesting thing. We imagine it keeps unwanted things out, but it also keeps us in. It is built from judgments, conclusions, fears, identities, and all the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we are not. The wall promises safety, but its cost is participation. From behind it, we no longer meet life directly. We meet our interpretations of life.

So I left the movie unfinished for a while.

When the resistance settled, when the need to defend a position loosened its grip, I turned it back on. Nothing about the movie had changed. What had changed was my willingness to look. I could see what was there more acceptingly, more actually, rather than through the lens of what I thought should or should not be there.

The wall had softened.

And on the other side of that wall was not agreement. It was not approval. It was not endorsement.

It was contact.

So much of life is spent circling. Circling people. Circling experiences. Circling ourselves. We move around things rather than through them, protected by our conclusions and isolated by them at the same time. It is a lonely rhythm, endlessly orbiting the world instead of actually being in it.

What we call morality is often mixed with something else entirely: fear of our own thoughts, fear of our own impulses, fear of what we might discover if we stopped running from ourselves.

So we judge. We look down. We separate. We create distance between ourselves and whatever disturbs us.

Until, inevitably, we become the thing being judged.

The roles change, but the structure remains the same.

Anyone who steps outside that circular arrangement discovers a different kind of freedom. Not freedom to indulge every impulse, nor freedom from discernment, but freedom to consider. Freedom to remain present without immediately reaching for a verdict.

That freedom is terrifying.

Which may be the precise reason it is worth pursuing.