Vachon Imagined

This morning I walked from the dining room to the place where I write, and I did it seamlessly.

A world lost in itself might have looked at me and said:

Wait. You’re the dining room.

No, no—you’re the writing room.

Would you just pick one?

Would you just stay still long enough so I can make you into something permanent?

Because that is what the world of sameness wants. It wants to know what you are so it can keep you there. And really, that is about comfort—not growth.

Growth is going to challenge the assumption that says, There’s nothing more for me to learn.

And underneath that assumption is often something much more vulnerable:

I’m afraid to try something new.

It could be a new way of thinking. A new way of doing the dishes. A new way of loving someone. A new way of seeing yourself.

It doesn’t matter.

We are creatures of same.

And anything that challenges same must be wrong.

Not just wrong.

Dangerous.

So dangerous that we must destroy it.

Ah yes.

We must create a war against it.

Kill it.

Except it doesn’t die.

Because life doesn’t stop being life simply because we have decided what it is supposed to be.

When you move between hate and love, or guilt and freedom, you may think you are changing. But not in the realm of God.

God is not demanding that you become one permanent thing.

God is allowing you to walk.

God is allowing you to change.

God is allowing you to be the dining room one moment and the writing room the next without demanding that you explain yourself.

But we get the thing backward.

We believe we are the body.

We believe we are the room.

We believe we are the writer.

We believe we are the people we love, the people who hurt us, the religion we wear, the roles we have been given, the stories we have told about ourselves.

And yes, you are allowed to experience all of it.

But the moment you take that allowance and try to force it into permanence so you can remain the same, you have mistaken the freedom to live for the safety of being known.

You might win the race.

But you won’t win the battle.

Because the battle was never yours to win.

It is already happening.

And it is already being won by life itself—the life that keeps moving, keeps changing, keeps allowing.

Wear your clothes.

Wear your religion.

Love your people.

Call yourself whatever you need to call yourself for the moment.

But don’t forget the land of the free that made it possible.

The freedom that made it yours.

And don’t forget that freedom means you are allowed to change your mind.

You are allowed to walk into another room.

You are allowed to become something you weren’t yesterday.

You are allowed to be here without becoming permanent.

Because you were never the room.

You were always the one walking through it.