Vachon Imagined

You hear a noise.

Immediately:

What’s wrong?

I need to run.

I need to help.

Shit!

You don’t have to think about it.

Your body responds before your mind can explain what happened.

That’s normal.

It’s an animal response. A human response. Something happens, and the nervous system moves toward protection: run, fight, freeze, help.

Instantly.

In another tangible scenario,

The child hears her parents arguing.

What’s wrong?

I need to help.

Make it stop.

The child isn’t analyzing the situation. The child is responding to a perceived threat to safety.

And if this happens enough, the response can become a way of living. We begin organizing our lives around preventing the next threat, managing the next reaction, controlling the next outcome.

And this is the practice of tyranny.

It is a habit every tyrannical leader understands: create fear, create instability, then offer yourself as the person who can make it stop.

The person who controls the environment becomes the person everyone looks to for safety.

What began as “What’s wrong? I need to help!” becomes “Do what I say, and you’ll be safe.”

The adult walks into a room and senses tension.

Someone is quiet.

Someone is irritated.

Two people aren’t speaking.

And immediately:

What’s wrong?

What happened?

What can I do?

The peacekeeper begins policing and controlling the environment.

They explain one person to the other. They soften someone’s words. They apologize for something they didn’t do. They make a joke. They change the subject.

Anything to make the room feel safe again.

And when everyone finally settles down, they can breathe.

But notice what happened.

Their peace depended on everyone else’s peace.

That’s not peace.

That’s control and taken too far that’s tyranny.

The peacekeeper is trying to make the outside world safe so the inside world can settle down.

The peacemaker learns something different.

They can hear the noise without immediately becoming the noise.

They can feel tension without becoming tense.

They can recognize anger without returning it.

They feel.

They notice.

They release.

This doesn’t mean they never act. It means they learn to distinguish an emergency from an experience.

Not every noise means run.

Not every conflict means intervene.

Not every uncomfortable feeling means something is wrong.

And that distinction can change a life.

Because eventually we discover that peace was never dependent upon the room being quiet.

Peace or God is and was “us” before the noise began.