Vachon Imagined

The person who truly takes the high road is the one who first acknowledges hell.

The ego can make us feel very good about ourselves for choosing restraint, forgiveness, or grace. It can quietly build an identity around being the one who always rises above, the one who knows better, the one who is different.

“I take the high road.”

“I know God.”

“I know Jesus.”

“I know the truth.”

The words matter less than the spirit behind them.

Because the moment goodness becomes an identity, pride has already entered through the back door.

The person who takes the high road is not someone unfamiliar with darkness. Quite the opposite. They know hell intimately. They have seen what resentment does to the heart. They have witnessed revenge consume the one seeking it. They understand that every road eventually returns to the sender.

That understanding changes a person.

Those who love do not need to become justice, because they know justice finds all people eventually, just as death finds every soul.

Life leaves its mark on us. It shapes us through joy and suffering, triumph and loss. The question is not whether we will be marked, but by what.

Some become beasts of their wounds.

Others become saviors through them.

Yet even these are stories the mind tells.

For beneath the beast and beneath the savior is something deeper still.

Life itself.

Not our ideas about life. Not our religions, philosophies, identities, or names for it.

Life.

The thing that existed before we called it God, before we built altars to it, before we divided it into tribes of believers and unbelievers.

It has no name.

It belongs to no one.

And perhaps true humility is recognizing that we do not stand above it as its owners or interpreters.

We stand within it.

Breathing it.

Becoming it.

Returning to it.