Vachon Imagined

When two people grow to hate each other, it is often something within themselves that they have not yet made peace with. And then people, naturally, choose sides.

This is how conflict unfolds.

The ego—or that part of ourselves that edges out the wholeness of things and narrows possibility—feels compelled, addicted even, to divide the world into camps. He’s right. She’s wrong. We are good. They are bad.

This is the nature of blame, guilt, shame, and the unaccountable mind. It seeks certainty through division.

Accountability, however, is different.

Accountability first faces blame, guilt, shame, and fear. It does not run from them, nor does it project them onto others. It sits with them, examines them, and then makes a decision. A choice rooted not in self-protection, but in truth.

Yet people rarely judge decisions on truth alone. They judge them through perception, and perhaps even more powerfully, through belief.

Belief is a strange force. It can create intimacy between strangers and distance between lovers. It can make relationship, understanding, and openness nearly impossible between people who do not share the same story about the world.

And so division grows.

Not because people do not want love, but because they do. Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to give that same love. Yet many do not know how because they have not learned to let go of the ego, that constant insistence on being right, being justified, being separate.

They have not let go of the flesh—not the body itself, but the attachment to identity, to certainty, to self.

And letting go is not a single act.

It is a daily practice. An hourly practice. A moment-by-moment surrender.

The great paradox is that we spend so much of our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that we find ourselves most clearly when we loosen our grip on who we think we are.