Vachon Imagined

Each morning when I drop my son off at camp, he says, “Mom, come in with me, please.” I ask him why, and although he knows the people there and has walked through those doors for years, he answers, “I am shy.” In that moment, I watch his body contract, as if consciousness itself were folding inward. A clear sky becomes clouded, not by the world, but by the mind interpreting it. He has entered the state we call shyness—a self‑constructed mode of being—and he is frightened by what he encounters there.

Humans do this endlessly. We orbit the same emotions, returning to them as if they were gravitational centers of our inner universe. We become afraid of them not because they are inherently threatening, but because we resist them or elevate them into something mythic. To deny an emotion is to ensure its return; to glorify it is to give it power. But to meet ourselves as we are, moment by moment, reveals a deeper truth: we are not confined by the mind’s movements. We are not limited by the knowledge we have accumulated. We are the awareness that perceives both.

So as I look at him, asking him to meet my eyes, I remind him: you may feel shy now, and you may feel shy again, but the more you look directly at it—eye to eye—and then turn away from it, the more it dissolves. Eventually it will leave, and it will forget your name. And when fear returns, as all states of mind do, this is the voice he will hear—the one that teaches him he is larger than the body that tries to contain him.