Vachon Imagined

When I was a kid working on cars with my grandfather, he’d tell me to pass him a certain tool. Most of the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. A wrench was just a piece of metal. A socket was another mysterious object buried somewhere in a toolbox.

Only through repetition did those strange sounds become meaningful.

He would point.

I would watch.

He would show me how it was used.

Then he would say its name again.

And again.

And again.

This is how learning works. What we repeat becomes familiar. What becomes familiar feels true. Eventually, it settles into us as fact, identity, belief.

Thankfully, most of us don’t argue about wrenches.

Unless, of course, a wrench means something incredibly valuable to you, and if that’s the case, my condolences.

But what we do argue about are beliefs.

Ah yes, beliefs—the stories the mind has told itself so many times that they’ve grown like vines through concrete. By the time they’re established, nobody is pulling them out without a bulldozer.

Take almost any word and place ten people in a room, and you’ll discover ten different meanings.

Freedom.

Love.

Truth.

Justice.

God.

The moment a word leaves one mouth and enters another, it begins transforming. It is like learning a foreign language where there are twenty different words for “wrench.” Eventually, everyone becomes exhausted trying to figure out whether they’re talking about the same thing and calls the whole thing off.

Religion thrives in this territory.

Not because of certainty.

Because of belief.

Belief is repetition with roots.

It is what a person tells themselves over and over until the story becomes inseparable from the storyteller.

And few words have accumulated more stories than the word God.

We often speak of God as though it were a person standing somewhere behind the curtain of existence.

Something good happens.

God.

Something terrible happens.

God.

A child is born.

God.

A storm destroys a town.

God.

The word gets stretched across everything until it becomes difficult to know whether we’re describing reality or simply our interpretation of it.

I’ve searched for this God in science books.

In equations.

In galaxies.

In atoms.

In the endless machinery of nature.

And what I keep finding is not God.

I keep finding myself.

Not the self as an individual person, but the self as the one assigning meaning.

The one interpreting.

The one naming.

The one looking.

Things end whether we believe in them or not.

Continents move.

Stars collapse.

Airplanes fall from the sky.

Bodies are born.

Bodies die.

None of it requires our agreement.

Reality unfolds with or without our permission.

What changes is the meaning we assign to it.

And meaning is where humanity lives.

Not in the event itself, but in the story told about the event.

Not in the word, but in what the word points toward.

Perhaps that is where language finally fails.

Not because words are useless, but because they can only point.

They can never become the thing itself.

And so what remains is this.

Now.

This moment.

This breath.

This powerful stillness beneath every explanation.

The quiet presence of being here at all.

And when all the words have exhausted themselves, when every belief has argued itself into a corner, what remains is the undeniable fact of existence itself.

Here you are.

Alive.

Aware.

A miracle beyond description.

And somehow, against all odds, becoming more amazing than you were yesterday.