Vachon Imagined

My husband is a brilliant man.

Stanford graduate. Engineer. Doctor of Management.

Meanwhile, I speak fluent metaphor.

Sometimes I’ll begin explaining something, and I can almost see him mentally opening a spreadsheet, looking for formulas that simply do not exist.

Variables unknown.

Insufficient data.

Hypothesis rejected.

Wife still talking…

God bless that man.

He stays for the whole lecture anyway.

Then there’s my son.

He’s autistic, which means he stims. For anyone unfamiliar with stimming, imagine the body suddenly deciding that sitting still is no longer part of today’s agenda. Sometimes it’s bouncing. Sometimes it’s humming. Sometimes it’s a joyful burst of movement that seems to say, “If this energy doesn’t come out somehow, we’re all going to find out what happens.”

As his mother, I’ve learned something remarkable.

Energy wants to move.

It always has.

Living with an engineer who organizes the world into elegant systems and a son whose body occasionally says, “No thank you, we’re dancing now,” has left me feeling, at times, like I’ve immigrated to a foreign country without a phrasebook.

After enough years, it becomes strangely convincing.

I’ve been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

Spend enough time trying to keep up with the engineer, translate fluent metaphor into spreadsheets, interpret joyful stimming, and occasionally wonder whether everyone has eaten today, and suddenly I’m convinced I’ve picked up ADHD, autism, and probably a few honorary degrees in emotional acrobatics.

The funny thing is, none of it is contagious.

But our experience of one another is.

We absorb each other’s rhythms.

We borrow each other’s anxieties.

We feel another person’s joy in our own bodies.

We live through one another far more than we realize.

And that has taught me something.

The body is a remarkable container.

It holds unimaginable energy, memory, perception, feeling, and awareness. It gathers experience and gives it form. Yet for everything it carries, it remains astonishingly limited.

The body tires.

The body ages.

The body becomes ill.

Not because it has failed.

Because it is doing exactly what bodies do.

We spend so much of our lives believing that life is happening to us from the outside.

But what we call reality is always arriving through us.

Through perception.

Through memory.

Through consciousness.

Through the nervous system.

The world we know is inseparable from the body that receives it.

When the body is exhausted, we imagine we need something outside ourselves to restore us.

Sometimes we need rest.

Sometimes we need movement.

Sometimes we need to dance.

Sometimes we need silence.

Not because these things give us life, but because they allow life to move freely through us again.

The body was never meant to carry the weight of permanence.

It was meant to participate in movement.

To receive.

To express.

To surrender.

A body willing to surrender life, rather than possess it, becomes strangely free.

And it is remarkable what a body can do when it is no longer trying to become more than it was ever meant to be.

Placed in its proper relationship to life—through humility, through reverence, and through love—it remembers that it was never the source.

It was always the vessel.