Vachon Imagined

Every so often I clean out my closets. I empty the drawers, sort through what no longer belongs, and put everything back in its place. When I’m finished, I feel lighter, almost euphoric. It reminds me of running long distances years ago. The first couple of miles were full of resistance—my thoughts racing, my body negotiating with itself—but then something would shift. Around mile two or three, everything became effortless. My mind quieted. I wasn’t chasing anything anymore. I was simply moving.

Cleaning my house gives me that same feeling. Order replaces chaos. Clarity replaces clutter. For a moment, I feel free.

I’ve realized, though, that what I’m really experiencing isn’t freedom itself. It’s certainty.

The drawers are organized. The run is over. The task is complete. My mind whispers, Good. That’s settled.

We love that feeling.

It isn’t really about clean closets or crossed finish lines. We crave the relief that comes from believing something has finally been resolved. We move from suffering to certainty and mistake that certainty for peace.

We often approach healing the same way.

A difficult relationship ends, and we believe we’ve left our pain behind. Then another relationship begins, and somehow the same fears, the same reactions, the same patterns quietly reappear. Not because life is repeating itself, but because nothing was ever happening outside of us in the first place.

The relationship did not contain the suffering. It revealed it.

We do the same with people every day.

Someone speaks harshly, and we say, “They made me angry.”

But anger wasn’t created in that moment. It was awakened. Their actions became the mirror in which a particular state of consciousness appeared, and almost instantly we judged both the feeling and the person. We froze them into an identity: They are selfish. They are cruel. They are impossible.

At the very same moment, we unknowingly froze ourselves as well.

This is what certainty does.

It takes something living and turns it into something fixed.

Every judgment is an attempt to stop a moving river long enough to give it a name.

We call someone selfish, generous, arrogant, broken, successful, difficult. We do the same to ourselves. We take a single moment, a single action, a single emotion, and mistake it for an identity.

There is comfort in doing this. Once someone has become “the difficult one,” we no longer have to remain present with them. Once we’ve decided who we are, we no longer have to remain curious about ourselves. Certainty relieves us of the responsibility of seeing.

But rivers never stop flowing.

Neither does consciousness.

Every person is more than the last thing they did. Every moment contains the possibility of something new. The instant we insist that movement become permanent, we stop participating in reality and begin living inside our own conclusions.

The need to be right has never really been about truth at all.

Rather, it is our deepest attempt to make life stand still.

To be right is to believe the case is closed. The person is understood. The future is predictable. The uncertainty has ended.

But life has never asked us to be certain.

It has only asked us to be present.

The clean drawers will become cluttered again.

The runner will eventually stop.

Another relationship will begin.

Another challenge will arrive.

Life will continue unfolding exactly as it always has.

The question is not whether we can make life certain.

The question is whether we can meet each moment without imprisoning it inside yesterday’s judgment.

The only certainty worth holding is not that we are right, but that life is always greater than the story we are telling about it.

Freedom is not found by reaching a permanent conclusion about ourselves or anyone else. It is found by remaining awake to what is unfolding before us, without rushing to turn it into a verdict.

The need to be right disappears the moment we realize that the river was never ours to stop.

It was only ours to see.