Vachon Imagined

This morning, as I was making my bed, a memory came back to me.

In the Army, we were taught to make our beds a certain way. The corners had to be folded at precise angles. Even our underwear had to be folded to exact measurements. Everything had to be orderly, measured, and exact.

I still make my bed this way. The corners are precise, orderly, measured.

One day, a fellow Soldier was caught because his bed wasn’t made to standard. The drill sergeant made him strap a mattress to his back with ropes and march from building to building carrying it for everyone to see.

The strategy was humiliation. The idea was simple: embarrass him enough that he would never make that mistake again. Conditioning through shame can be effective in getting people to follow the rules.

But without presence, humiliation becomes something we fear instead of something that awakens us.

Pure presence—the life of wholeness and fullness—doesn’t fear anything because fear doesn’t live there. Presence doesn’t merely follow the rules; it is the rule. It is the law that quietly reminds us that what we give, we receive.

Humiliate others, and humiliation eventually returns to you. Not as punishment, but as cause and effect. As giving and receiving.

Yet when you become fully present, something changes.

You can have memory without becoming trapped in memory. You can have judgment without becoming judgment. Every human experience is allowed to exist without defining who you are. In the fullness of God, everything has its place.

Without that presence, however, humiliation becomes a story about how life shouldn’t be happening the way it is. Memory becomes something we believe we shouldn’t have, even while we’re having it. We begin dividing reality into what should be and what shouldn’t be.

That is where separation begins.

No one has ever conquered division by creating more division. The only true victory is over ourselves. Those who transform the world do so not by merely following the rules, but by stepping so deeply into presence that nothing can shake them. Nothing can even stir them.

In that presence, fear loses its grip. Shame loses its story. Memory loses its chains.

What remains is simply the fullness of being.