Vachon Imagined

The merry-go-round was one of my favorite pieces of playground equipment when I was a child. Oh my goodness, it made me feel alive.

I can still hear myself laughing. For a few precious moments, everything else disappeared. There was only motion, only wind, only laughter. No one telling me to quiet down. No one telling me to be more ladylike, more polite, more like someone else.

I can still feel it now as I write.

What abandoned joy.

No one standing over my shoulder creating a self-consciousness that would one day follow me everywhere. No inner narrator evaluating every movement, every word, every feeling.

The narrator says: That was beautiful. I am beautiful.

Then, moments later: That was wrong. I am wrong.

Before long, even the merry-go-round becomes contaminated by judgment.

The child spins. The adult evaluates the spinning.

The child laughs. The adult wonders how the laughter sounds.

The child lives the moment. The adult narrates it.

Eventually, we step off the merry-go-round and never return, not because the joy disappeared, but because we became more interested in managing our experience than having it.

We cannot simply be happy. We must understand our happiness.

We cannot simply be sad. We must fix our sadness.

We cannot simply touch what arises. We must improve it, master it, overcome it, or explain it.

Yet the gift of the merry-go-round was never happiness itself. It was freedom from the one who was measuring happiness.

It was total beingness.

For a moment, there was no separation between me and life. No observer standing apart from the experience. No judge deciding what should stay and what should go.

Just spinning.
Just laughter.
Just being.

To find that self again, we do not climb higher into thought or become experts at emotion. We step beyond the judge altogether. We return to the place that existed before the first comparison, before the first judgment, before the first story about who we should be.

The place from which everything arises and to which everything returns.

The place where nothing needs improvement because nothing has yet been divided into good and bad.

The place where we are free to ride the merry-go-round once more.