Vachon Imagined

All of us have had times when something wasn’t working.

Two major examples come to mind for me. The first was when I was learning coding and decoding in the Army. At their core, they were logic problems, but each phase became more difficult than the last. The problems piled up faster than I could solve them. My hair was falling out. I wasn’t sleeping well. In the Army, failure doesn’t simply mean getting a poor grade; it can mean being recycled and starting all over again. The pressure became cyclical. The harder I pushed, the more exhausted I became. The more exhausted I became, the harder everything felt.

The second example is writing. Sometimes I know a piece hasn’t landed. If it doesn’t feel true or complete to me, it probably won’t land well for anyone else either. I can sit with it for hours—rearranging sentences, adjusting tone, trying to force clarity into something that refuses to resolve.

There is a saying in Buddhism: Do less, accomplish more.

The first time I heard it, it challenged my way of thinking. I like ideas that challenge me. Some lessons reveal themselves immediately; others take years to settle. Advanced coding was like that for me. I couldn’t follow every concept to its conclusion right away, but I kept returning to it. Over time, what once felt inaccessible slowly became familiar.

That is the beauty of doing nothing.

Not avoidance. Not laziness. Space.

Often our best ideas arrive when we are no longer staring directly at the problem. We go for a walk. We wash dishes. We drive somewhere. We sleep. Then a symbol appears, a memory surfaces, a connection forms. Suddenly we see something we couldn’t see before.

The mind gathers through effort, but understanding arrives through space.

When we stop forcing an answer, we give it room to find us. We return to the same idea from a different angle. We notice what was always present but previously hidden by pressure.

We step away from a problem believing we have left it behind, only to discover we were finally giving ourselves the space to see what was there all along.