Vachon Imagined

When two people drift apart, it is rarely because of arguments or disagreement alone. More often, it is because they have stopped accepting one another. Yet acceptance of another person is difficult without first accepting ourselves.

Two people can witness the same event and come away with entirely different experiences. Subjectively, each person’s experience is real. Objectively, it is also true that no two people see the same thing in exactly the same way. They interpret through memory, emotion, expectation, fear, hope, and experience. This is where one thing becomes two.

Love gives us the opportunity to witness this without dividing ourselves from one another. Love is not agreement. Love is the expression that remains before judgment enters. Duality begins when we abandon that expression and surrender ourselves to fixed ideas instead of allowing thoughts to arise, pass through us, and disappear without immediately judging, analyzing, or defending them.

First, listen. Be present. Let another person exist before your explanation of them does.

Analysis has its place. Perception has its place. Discernment has its place. But if they arrive before presence, they become barriers rather than bridges.

Do not become so fixed that you miss the living person standing before you.

Do not do this to yourself.

And perhaps more importantly, do not do this to the people you say you love, and to whom you have committed your life.