Vachon Imagined

My son is attached to his Nintendo Switch. How do I know this? Because when it is taken away, he is devastated. Tears come, a meltdown follows, and promises are made that he will never again become so angry that he loses control.

And this is why I take it away.

His emotions become bigger than him, and this is where problems begin. Not because he is a bad child, but because he has reached a place where the thing he wants has become more powerful than his ability to remain present with himself.

A Nintendo Switch may seem like a small thing, but the attachment itself is not small. It is the same mechanism that follows us into adulthood. It is the same mechanism that, when left unseen, creates suffering.

All conflict in this world, whether something as small as a child losing a game or something as large as a war fought in the name of freedom, oil, resources, or material gain, comes back to one fundamental human experience: the desire to possess. The desire to say, this is mine.

We do this with objects, but we also do this with people.

A spouse becomes “mine.” A child becomes “mine.” A life we have built becomes “mine.” And when that spouse dies, when they leave, when they choose someone else, or when something we believed belonged to us is suddenly gone, we experience a profound loss of identity.

The pain is not only the loss of the person or thing itself. It is the painful realization that perhaps it was never ours to begin with.

And this realization is the beginning of understanding attachment, not as an ideal we should rise above, but as something deeply human. We attach because attachment feels like safety. We attach because we believe it protects us from suffering. We attach because the thought of being left alone with ourselves can feel unbearable.

But suffering is part of life.

The idea of “mine” is often the illusion we create to keep ourselves from facing the vastness of being alone with ourselves. Really alone. Without the objects, roles, relationships, achievements, and identities we use to define who we are.

This is why isolation can feel so painful. It strips away the things we use to distract ourselves from what we fear most: encountering ourselves without anything to hold onto.

And yet, it is often in that very isolation that our attachments reveal themselves most clearly.

There is nothing to be ashamed of in this. There is only the opportunity for honesty.

Even as adults, we come undone when something temporary, something never truly owned, something that was only ever on loan, is taken away from us.

We forget that life was never something we possessed.

Love was never something we owned.

Everything we have ever touched, every person we have ever loved, every breath we have ever taken, was given freely before we ever had the ability to call it “mine.”

Life was here before we arrived.

Love was here before we named it.

And freedom begins when we stop trying to possess what was only ever given.