Vachon Imagined

The benefit of knowing yourself is that you begin to know others too.

The words of others pass through you. Their ideas, their opinions, their judgments — you do not have to resist them through tension, hostility, or doubt. They move through your awareness, and from that place, you respond.

Anything a person resists or denies is still a part of the human faculty — a part of the one consciousness experienced as separate parts. These divided parts are what draw us into conflict: the conflict between what we say and what we ultimately do; the conflict between wanting love and pushing it away; the conflict between not wanting to be seen as a whore while longing to be perceived as a Madonna; the conflict between kindness and hatred, compassion and cruelty, acceptance and rejection.

This conflict is where human beings find themselves — and where they find all others too.

We recognize others because we have met these same contradictions within ourselves. The parts we judge in another are often the very parts of humanity we have struggled to understand within our own experience.

To step beyond this conflict is not to erase it or deny it. It is to allow things to be as they are. It is to stop fighting the movement of life within us and around us.

And in that allowing, we move freely.

We become free.

Because freedom is freedom. It does not require a fight to exist. It does not need to be chased, conquered, or earned through resistance. Freedom has been waiting beneath every struggle, quietly present beneath every attempt to escape what is.

It hides only because we are fighting it.

It remains unseen because we are fighting life as it arrives — fighting the moment, fighting our experience, fighting ourselves.

But when the fight ends, when we stop demanding that life be anything other than what it is, freedom reveals itself.

It was never something we had to find.

It was what remained when we stopped running.