Vachon Imagined

When lives change, our footing can suddenly feel groundless.

Children leave for college. Relationships end, and new ones begin. Someone does something you never thought they had it in them to do. People lose jobs, careers they spent lifetimes building, homes, communities, or identities they thought would always be theirs. Sometimes it happens suddenly. Sometimes we know it is coming and still aren’t prepared for the loss.

Because when these things disappear, it isn’t only our circumstances that change. Our identity changes with them.

The person we thought we were is no longer there.

And that can feel like death.

So we grieve. And grief has a place. It doesn’t mean we have lost our faith, nor does it mean we are failing to trust something deeper. Grief is part of being human. We should not rush ourselves out of it simply because we believe there is something beyond it.

And people will try.

They don’t like to see you in pain. They become uncomfortable with what they cannot fix, control, or understand. So they push. They belittle. They shame. They guilt you for not moving faster, for not being who you were before, for not making your pain easier for them to witness.

Their discomfort can become anger toward you for something they cannot control.

But being present doesn’t mean simply being physically there. It means being present with who you are as you change. It means having the courage to acknowledge, Okay. This is where I am now.

Not where I was.

Not where someone else thinks I should be.

Where I am.

And from there, the questions become different.

What is within my control?

What can I change about my circumstances?

What can I change about my disposition?

What needs to be accepted, and what needs to be acted upon?

What can I release, and what can I begin again?

There is power in asking those questions without judging the place from which they are asked. We don’t have to pretend that the valley is the mountaintop. We don’t have to make our pain meaningful before we are ready to understand it.

We can simply become present to it.

And in that presence, we begin to find our footing again.

There is a place for the mountaintops, the moments when life feels so full that we want to scream like a child, Look at me! Look at my life! Look how beautiful this is! Those moments can feel like love, and they are beautiful. But they are not the whole story.

The mountaintop is not a permanent place. In some ways, the top is simply the beginning of the descent.

Everything we love in this temporary life is subject to change. People change. Bodies change. Relationships change. Careers end. Children grow up. Doors close. What once seemed certain can disappear. And when it does, the fall can be brutal. It can be isolating. It can make us question not only ourselves, but our faith in anything deeper than what we can see and hold.

Yet this is precisely where something extraordinary becomes possible.

When everything temporary has been stripped away, we are given an opportunity to discover what was never temporary to begin with.

The identities we built around our roles, accomplishments, relationships, possessions, and other people’s perceptions of us can fall away. And underneath all of it, there can be something quieter. Something that does not rise and fall with circumstances. Something that does not need applause when we are on the mountaintop or rescue when we are in the valley.

A deeper presence.

A deeper peace.

A deeper identity.

That is what loss can ultimately teach us, not that the things we loved were meaningless, but that they were never meant to be the foundation of our entire existence.

And once you find that deeper ground, something changes.

You begin to recognize the difference between what brings you temporary comfort and what actually brings you peace. You begin to understand that not every relationship is worth preserving, not every opportunity is worth pursuing, and not every form of belonging is worth the price of abandoning yourself.

You become willing to give up the company of almost anyone if their presence requires you to give up the presence that has finally grounded you.

That isn’t necessarily loneliness.

It is the opposite.

It is the first time you have truly stopped abandoning yourself just to avoid being alone.

And that is the gift hidden inside the falling apart: not the return to who we were, but the discovery of who we are when everything we thought defined us is gone.

The mountaintop is beautiful. The valley is painful. Both are part of the human experience.

But neither is home.

Home is the deeper place we learn to return to, the place beneath achievement, beneath loss, beneath love and heartbreak, beneath the identities that come and go.

And once you have found it, once you learn to remain there and return there, there is no longer the same need to compromise it.

Because what you have found is not dependent on circumstance.

It does not belong to one season of your life.

It does not disappear when someone leaves, when something ends, or when the world no longer recognizes the person you thought you were.

It translates through the ages.

And it remains.