Vachon Imagined

The up and down of relationships is much like the nature we can look out and see. Everything is passing. Everything is changing. What is alive tomorrow may be dead today.

Every exchange of back and forth that we experience in relationships is happening within ourselves, too. It is always thoughtful and kind when someone can make us feel better, but ultimately, we have to learn to walk this path alone.

We have to learn how to be with ourselves without becoming the very violence, hatred, and abuse we see in the world. This requires self-accountability. It requires discipline. We have to learn to sit with what arises within us without immediately making someone else responsible for it.

When we deny ourselves, we do not see clearly. When we project onto the world what we refuse to take accountability for within ourselves, we do not see clearly. And when we lack the discipline to examine our own thoughts, reactions, and behaviors, we become governed by them.

We cannot control what another person does. We cannot control whether someone stays, leaves, loves us, disappoints us, or changes. But we can become responsible for what we do with what happens inside us.

That is where our freedom is.

So the solution is very clear, just as it is in nature.

We learn to live with the passing.

The passing of time.
The passing of people.
The passing of seasons.
The passing of life itself.

Everything is always moving. Everything is ever changing.

Our work is not to stop the movement. It is to learn how to move with it without abandoning ourselves.

And that takes discipline. It takes the courage to look honestly at ourselves. To stop blaming. To stop projecting. To stop demanding from another person what we have not learned to give ourselves.

It is not that we no longer need one another. It is that we learn to love one another without making another person responsible for our peace.

And still, we have been given a courage we cannot explain—a courage that allows us to endure the toughest storms and even the highest highs.

We do not have to hold on to any of it.

We only have to learn how to be here while it passes.