Vachon Imagined

The only person you are ever truly in relationship with is yourself.

Take any past event. You can tell me how someone loved you or how someone hurt you, but that life is now you. It lives within you. It has become part of your seeing, your thinking, your expectations, your fears. Just because you left the experience does not mean the experience left you. It remains, revealing itself in how you speak to others, how you receive them, and most of all, in how you speak to yourself.

This is conditioning.

No one is entirely right here. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they have been given, carrying experiences they often do not understand. We imagine ourselves in relationship with people, events, and identities that seem solid and permanent, yet the moment we point to them, they are already gone. The conversation is over. The feeling has passed. The version of you who lived it no longer exists.

You cannot hold life still long enough to name it.

Yet the irony of finding your true self—perhaps the only real paradox of drawing closer to God while becoming less attached to the world—is that you must first recognize this doing. Your doing. The endless effort to manage, defend, judge, interpret, and control experience.

Then you hand it over.

And in that surrender, something else is revealed: an ever-present, ever-living reality that was here before your thoughts arrived and remains after they disappear. It is not you, yet it is closer than you. It is above you and beneath you, within you and beyond you. It moves through every person, every circumstance, every living thing.

It does not force itself upon anyone.

It waits quietly beneath the noise of the mind, waiting for surrender, waiting for permission, waiting for us to stop mistaking our conditioning for who we are.