Vachon Imagined

There are moments when we discover that we cannot handle something.

Something happens that is too hard, too painful, too unbearable. A loved one dies. News arrives of an incident we could never have imagined, much less wanted. Something inside us is activated, and suddenly we are no longer standing on the ground we thought we knew. It can feel as though we are being torn in half.

It is not a literal death, though something in us often dies. We are rarely the same afterward.

And yet, these experiences give us something, too. They give us a life to share. A story to tell. A language for pain that did not exist before we lived it. They allow us to reach toward the person who comes after us and say, I know something about this place. I have been here.

This is how we build community. Not only through our strength, but through our weakness. Through the moments when we need someone to sit beside us, carry something for us, or simply remind us that we are still here.

Weakness humbles us. It reminds us that no matter how strong we believe ourselves to be, there is always something that can come along and rearrange us. Something that forces us to reconsider our definitions of life, of what is permissible, of what we believe should or should not happen. Our perceptions change because the world has changed, and sometimes because we have.

In certain cultures, weakness is treated as something almost impermissible. We are taught to conceal it, overcome it, dominate it. When strength becomes synonymous with power, we begin to build tyrants, within ourselves and around us. We become so afraid of weakness that we mistake control for courage.

But when we move beyond the duality of things, weakness and strength are no longer opposites.

We experience them differently in the body. One may feel like collapse and the other like endurance. But they are both expressions of the same human capacity to meet what life gives us.

When we resist experience, when we say, this cannot be happening while it is happening, we harden ourselves against reality. Things stop moving as easily. We get stuck.

Water does not do this.

Water meets the rock and moves around it. It finds the opening. It changes its course without needing to pretend the rock isn’t there.

When we resist what has happened, we become like water trapped behind a dam, pressing against something that will not move. We spend our energy trying to force our way through what cannot be changed, and eventually what was meant to move begins to stagnate.

Life is like water. It moves.

We cannot always decide where it goes. We cannot command it to return to where it was. We cannot stand in the river and insist that it flow backward simply because we preferred what was upstream.

Something has happened. It has already been done. We cannot change it. We do not have that kind of power.

But we can change our relationship to it.

That change begins with gentleness. A gentle, steady hand with ourselves when life brings us what we do not want, what we did not imagine, what we are certain we cannot bear.

Gentleness does not mean approval. It does not mean we wanted what happened or that we would choose it again. It means we stop fighting the fact that it happened.

Water does not fight the rock. It does not become angry with the riverbank for being there. It simply finds another way to move.

This is what we learn when life breaks open in ways we never would have chosen: not how to become harder, but how to remain moving.

When we harden ourselves completely, we may protect ourselves from feeling the wound, but we also stop the movement of everything around it. Grief cannot move. Love cannot move. Understanding cannot move. We cannot move.

We become stone.

But a gentle life is not a weak life. It is a life that remains permeable. A life that allows experience to pass through without allowing every experience to define its shape forever.

Humility produces a different kind of strength. It is a courage that does not need to prove itself. A life that does not demand that everything be different from what it is. A willingness to experience being human without needing to conquer the experience.

There is strength in standing.

There is also strength in being brought to your knees.

And sometimes, it is only when we stop trying to be invulnerable that we discover how much strength there is in simply being alive.

The water changes.

So do we.

Strength is not becoming something nothing can penetrate.

Strength is learning how to keep moving without needing the world to become something other than what it is.