Vachon Imagined

When we want to be happy, we are often rejecting the present moment of life, the very moment that contains happiness and sadness, the ups and downs, the movement of life within us.

We know this through something as simple as our breath.

There is something profoundly personal about breathing. Life enters the body, moves through us, and leaves us again. Without the ability to breathe, we die. And yet, before we have popularity, money, status, achievement, or anything else we spend our lives pursuing, we already have this.

We have breath.

We have life.

That alone is extraordinary.

And we can lose sight of it when we become consumed with the search for happiness. We begin treating the present moment as something that needs to be escaped, improved, or replaced. We tell ourselves that we will finally be happy when something changes, when something arrives, when something leaves, when we become someone different than who we are right now.

But in doing so, we reject the life that is already happening.

That moment will contain pain, too.

Sometimes excruciating pain.

Pain arrives in countless forms and moves through countless lives. It has existed for centuries alongside war, famine, death, violence, loss, grief, and suffering. Their perceived opposites exist alongside them: love, peace, abundance, birth, connection, joy.

I call them perceived opposites because perception clouds not only our judgment, but our mindsets. We decide what belongs and what doesn’t. We decide which parts of life are acceptable and which parts need to be removed.

But we don’t have that kind of power.

We are powerful, but we are not powerful enough to eliminate all of the possibilities of life.

We cannot prevent every war.

We cannot prevent every death.

We cannot prevent every heartbreak.

We cannot prevent every person from suffering.

And we certainly cannot prevent suffering permanently.

Life has been moving through these experiences for centuries. Through bodies. Through civilizations. Through generations. Through dimensions of existence we understand and dimensions we don’t.

Life keeps moving.

The question is whether we will move with it.

“What I have is enough.”

“Where I am is enough.”

Even when what I am holding is breaking me in two.

Because that breaking is not necessarily the failure of life.

It is the symphony coming through.

It is life moving through the ages. Life moving through flesh, through bone, through water, through rock. Life moving through everything we think should remain still.

Nothing can ultimately stand in its way.

The only thing we can do is stop getting in its way.

We do that by holding the life we’ve been given, the cup, as it has been called, and honoring it.

Not only when it makes us happy.

Especially when it doesn’t.

We don’t honor the cup by demanding that it always contain what we want.

We honor it by receiving what it contains.

Joy.

Grief.

Love.

Loss.

Beauty.

Pain.

All of it.

The breath does not ask whether we are happy before it enters us.

Life does not ask whether we approve before it moves through us.

So perhaps our task is not to become happy enough to finally accept life.

Our task is to accept life enough that happiness no longer has to be the condition for our gratitude.

Take the breath.

Feel the life moving.

Hold the cup.

And let life be life.