Vachon Imagined

When you cast your fears onto someone else, what are you really feeling?

Perhaps something within them.

Perhaps something within yourself.

Perhaps both.

This endless argument about what belongs to you and what belongs to me begins to lose its certainty when we recognize how deeply life moves between us. We affect one another constantly. We enter rooms and feel tension before a word is spoken. We sense warmth, anger, pride, resentment, grief, joy, and fear without anyone announcing their arrival.

Life recognizes life.

For those who see life as a continuous movement—an entry and an exit, a flowing into form and a flowing back out again—this becomes difficult to ignore. The boundaries remain useful, but they are not absolute.

And anyone can learn to see this.

It is not a gift reserved for the chosen, the enlightened, the spiritual elite, or the powerful. The notion that some people possess exclusive access to truth while others must depend upon them has always served someone. Usually those already holding power.

Life has a way of correcting such arrangements.

The powerful become powerless.

The powerless become powerful.

Both teach.

Both suffer.

Both love.

Both fear.

Both are expressions of the same life moving through different forms.

When someone is dismissive, you feel it.

When someone is angry, frustrated, ashamed, or defeated, you feel it.

You can hear it in their voice.

You can see it in their posture.

You can feel it in the space around them.

You can feel a person’s pride.

You can feel their sorrow.

You can feel their longing to be understood.

This is life exchanging itself with life.

Discernment, then, is not the ability to judge others. It is the ability to know when to speak and when to remain silent.

A child throwing a tantrum is not in a position to listen. Neither is an adult consumed by rage, certainty, fear, or humiliation. In those moments, biology constricts. Perspective narrows. The body prepares for survival rather than understanding.

Life itself becomes constricted.

But when a person is ready—when the defenses soften, when the fear loosens its grip, when the need to be right gives way to the desire to understand—something extraordinary becomes possible.

Healing.

Accountability.

Forgiveness.

Truth.

A person can confront what they once avoided.

They can hold others accountable and be held accountable themselves.

Whether they want to be or not.

And perhaps that is one of life’s great mysteries: that growth rarely arrives through force. It arrives when a person becomes capable of receiving what was always there, waiting patiently to be seen.

Waiting patiently to be felt.