Vachon Imagined

When a person lives in confinement, their entire day is planned for them. Every movement is measured. Every choice is limited. And so they search for small openings.

Working in the kitchen.

Working in construction.

A few moments outside.

Tiny tastes of freedom beyond the four walls closing in around them.

Relationships can feel much the same way.

A mother overwhelmed by the cries of her children may seek escape wherever she can find it. Sometimes she leaves. Sometimes she reaches for drugs. Sometimes she chases excitement. Sometimes she simply tries to numb the pain of existence itself.

The details change, but desire does not.

We see something.

We feel something.

And we move toward it.

In this way, we are not so different from those we cast out from society, from our communities, or from our minds.

The ego recoils at the suggestion.

“Oh no, I’m nothing like them.”

Perhaps your life looks different.

Perhaps your circumstances are different.

But there is little certainty to be found in that distinction.

For if you had lived their life, carried their burdens, inherited their fears, endured their losses, and faced their pressures, what would you have done?

The honest answer is that none of us truly know.

Faced with enough pressure, all people bend.

Eventually, most break.

This is why learning to walk through the world with humility is so alluring.

How do we love what we hate?

We don’t.

We can’t.

Not while we remain identified with the part of ourselves that judges.

The mind divides.

The mind separates.

The mind declares, “I am this, and they are that.”

Yet appearances are temporary.

Identities are fragile.

Stories change.

What appears solid today becomes dust tomorrow.

When the wall between you and life begins to break, something remarkable happens.

You suffer less.

And because you suffer less, you judge less.

Eventually, judgment gives way to understanding.

Not approval.

Not passivity.

Not the abandonment of discernment.

Understanding.

You take in information.

You see clearly.

You decide what is necessary.

But you do so without hatred.

Without superiority.

Without the desperate need to separate yourself from another human being.

There is a calm that emerges from this way of seeing.

A stillness.

A wisdom.

The kind people often attribute to God but rarely cultivate within themselves.

And perhaps wisdom is nothing more than this:

The recognition that under different circumstances, we might have become anyone.