Vachon Imagined

Learning how to water ski was an event when I was seven years old. My grandfather, manning the boat, made more turns around that lake than either of us could—or wanted to—remember. It was dizzying. I’d get halfway up, lose my balance, and crash back into the water.

I did this innumerable times.

Each time, he turned the boat around faithfully, offered a few notes, and told me to try again. I’d whine, and he’d come back. I’d complain, and he’d come back. I’d moan about being hungry, tired, cold, or frustrated, and he’d come back. Every time, he demanded that I try again.

What he was building looked like work ethic, but I think it was something deeper. The work ethic wasn’t being placed inside me; it was already there. Like everything else, it existed as a possibility waiting to be called forward.

Gentleness is often misunderstood. It isn’t giving in to excuses or participating in every fear that passes through a person. Gentleness is creating enough space for those excuses to subside so that what is possible can emerge. Everyone has doubts. Everyone has fears, jealousies, frustrations, and moments of thinking, I can’t do this.

But if you stay with the experience long enough to see it through to its end—just as my grandfather did with me on that lake—you discover something remarkable. Beneath every excuse and every fear is something reaching for you in return. Something patient. Something persistent. Something that believes in you far more than you can yet believe in yourself.

It teaches you that love doesn’t rescue us from difficulty. Love doesn’t remove the falls, the frustration, the doubt, or the work. Instead, it keeps turning the boat around. Again and again, it returns us to the place where we gave up on ourselves and asks us to look again—to see beyond our excuses and into what has been possible all along.

Love keeps turning the boat around.