Vachon Imagined

Discipline is not always meant to be fun. At times, it is simply meant to be brutal.

On the surface, it grabs your attention: ah, ah, not this way. Go the other way. But maybe you don’t listen. Maybe you do what you want. You are allowed to. It is simply not ultimate truth.

Discipline, or self-control, is the point between two points, flowing in all forms and in all directions. It is not the absence of movement. It is the intelligence within movement, the capacity to move without becoming lost in the movement itself.

And if discipline isn’t asking you to let go of something that hurts you, then maybe it isn’t discipline at all.

Because discipline will ask you—perhaps even force you, in this life—to return to the vine of your very existence. It can look like fighting yourself into a place where the door is closed for a reason.

Even when you are right.

Even when you have been treated unfairly.

Even when you have every reason to keep fighting.

Life can still force you another direction.

And life will keep disciplining you to help you. Again and again, it will bring you back to the places you resist, until eventually you begin to understand what the resistance was trying to teach you.

You can fight against it. You can rage against the closed door. Or you can keep moving with confidence, even when you don’t know the plan, because discipline eventually becomes something deeper than obedience.

It becomes trust.

And eventually, you will use that discipline as something working for you, rather than against you.

Ultimate truth doesn’t need anyone, because it already lives in everyone.

We see this more clearly when we become disciplined. Think about a glass of water, or a tree, as God itself.

The water exists inside the container, but it does not separate itself from the container. Even when it is poured out, it is still flowing from the container. And when the pouring is finished, there is a memory in the water now, a memory of being poured, of being held.

The tree is the same. The vines are given life by an intelligence moving through the tree, rising from the ground. Even when a vine is cut away from the limb, the intelligence remembers. It will grow around what was cut off, as if to prove its point.

You have the same capacity to see yourself being poured into this world.

Before you say anything, an intelligence is giving you the power to say it. And just because that power leaves the ordainment doesn’t mean it ceases to be.

That is the power of returning.

You never left.

And now you know.

Now you will listen.