Vachon Imagined

My son and I were working on math the other day, and both of us were getting frustrated. He kept arriving at the answer, but whenever I asked him to defend it, to show critical thinking like the great scientist he says he wants to become, uncertainty would creep in and he would begin guessing.

Like a teapot that had finally reached its limit, he blurted out, “I hate myself! I’m so stupid.”

A natural reaction when your back feels against the wall and hopelessness begins to close in.

After I picked my entire sense of self up off the floor from hearing those words come out of him, I reminded him to get himself together the only way anyone ever does: through practice.

Not math practice.

The practice.

So we grabbed each other’s hands, took a deep breath, and said together:

“We come together. We unify the spirit.”

The spirit is life itself. It has many forms. It can take the form of what we call hate. It can take the form of what we call love. It can arrive as fear, certainty, anger, joy, confusion, or peace.

But once you know and accept who you are, resistance begins to lose its grip.

You start to understand that there are many things you can do for people. You can encourage them, comfort them, guide them, and walk beside them. Yet the one thing you cannot do is force them to practice returning to their own nature.

That is work each person must do for themselves.

And perhaps that is why death is such a profound teacher. It arrives at every doorstep eventually, asking the same question:

Why do you fight so hard for what cannot be lost?

Life is already here.

It cannot die.

Forms come and go. Bodies appear and disappear. Thoughts rise and fall. Emotions surge and fade.

But life itself remains untouched by any of it.

It cannot lose.

It cannot be diminished.

It cannot become anything other than what it has always been.

And when we remember that, even for a moment, we come together again.

We unify the spirit.