Vachon Imagined

Yesterday, I received a text from my son’s camp counselor telling me that my son had been punched in the face. In an instant, grief swallowed me whole, followed by a rage only a parent truly knows.

But beneath that rage was something else.

There is a kind of seeing that has nothing to do with the eyes. It isn’t looking at the world. It is seeing yourself. Seeing the self before it becomes a lived experience we all call reality—which is, perhaps, nothing more than imagination with wings. Imagination that has taken on posture, form, a body, a name. We speak about reality as though it exists outside of us, when in truth it is unfolding through us, inseparable from humanity, from wholeness, from God itself.

Life happens.

No amount of parenting, wisdom, religion, philosophy, or self-improvement prevents life from happening. We try to paint ourselves and others into sainthood, pretending that goodness exempts us from anger, fear, or violence. It doesn’t.

Everyone is capable of harm. Everyone has harmed. No one is immune.

My son, now for the second time, found himself caught in something that wasn’t born from malice but from immediate human reaction. He was protecting someone else and, in doing so, became the one who was hurt.

How quickly we become experts after the fact.

“He should have…”

“They shouldn’t have…”

“I would have…”

The mind loves hindsight because it gives us the illusion of certainty. But if we’re honest, very few of us know how we will respond until the moment arrives. All the coaching, all the books, all the rehearsed virtues cannot prevent life from happening. They can prepare us, perhaps, but they cannot replace the moment itself.

And this is where self-awareness becomes sacred.

Self-awareness is neither praise nor condemnation. It is simply seeing.

Seeing the rage rise without becoming the rage.

Seeing the desperate instinct to protect without allowing it to become revenge.

Seeing fear without naming yourself fearful.

Seeing life happening through you instead of believing it is happening only to you.

Human beings possess a remarkable privilege. We can witness ourselves. We can observe our thoughts, weigh our actions, question our impulses, and choose differently tomorrow. That ability may be one of the greatest gifts consciousness has ever produced.

Not perfection.

Not moral superiority.

Simply the capacity to see.

The question has never been whether rage, fear, grief, or the need to defend will appear. They will. They belong to all of us. They are movements within the same field of consciousness we call humanity.

The real question is whether you are willing to witness them without immediately blaming someone else—or yourself.

Can you simply see?

Can you notice how life catches you before you catch yourself?

Because perhaps what we call free will begins there—not in controlling what arises, but in recognizing it before it hardens into identity.

Then something beautiful becomes possible.

We begin practicing new ways of meeting life.

We allow people to be accountable for their own battles while still offering compassion. We help without trying to become someone else’s savior. We stop carrying lives that were never ours to carry.

And in doing so, we discover something almost impossible to describe.

That every lesson, every heartbreak, every conflict, every moment of seeing, quietly returns us to the place we never truly left.

Back to the beginning.

Back to ourselves.

Back to the silent awareness that was watching long before the story ever began.