Vachon Imagined

The innocence of children is the innocence of awareness or God itself.

It is perhaps the closest we will ever come to experiencing life outside of our judgment of life.

My son, when I hurt his feelings, doesn’t hide it.

“Mom, you hurt my feelings.”

He cries when he cries.

He is sad when he is sad.

He is angry when he is angry.

The feeling comes, and he lets it move through him.

But now he is turning eleven, and something is beginning to change.

Self-awareness is entering.

And sometimes that makes me sad.

He is beginning to ask questions like, “Mom, will a girl love me with my teeth like this?”

And I think, Oh, here we go.

My husband and I are about to make an orthodontist very happy.

But underneath the humor is something much deeper.

He is beginning to see himself.

Not simply as life experiencing life, but as a person who can be seen by another person.

And with that comes the possibility of losing himself.

He begins to learn to look at himself from the outside.

He begins to wonder what he means to someone else.

He begins to wonder whether he is enough.

This is how the self begins to form.

Not because awareness disappears, but because we begin attaching what happens within awareness to something we call me.

And this is where conditioning enters.

Children are shaped through parents, through language, through expectations, through praise, through punishment, through culture, through everything we teach them about what they are supposed to be.

And when children are given adult responsibilities too soon, we can rob them of something precious.

Play.

Presence.

The simple experience of being alive without having to constantly evaluate what that life means.

And when children are abused—verbally, physically, sexually—they can be forced into self-awareness far too quickly.

They begin to feel their bodies in ways they do not understand.

The bad feeling becomes me.

The shame becomes me.

The thing my parent says about me becomes me.

The child doesn’t yet have the distance to say, This is something happening to me.

Instead, it becomes, This is who I am.

And this is how human beings are formed.

Through conditioning.

Through identification.

Through the gradual transformation of experience into identity.

And yet children still show us something adults spend their entire lives trying to recover.

They live in the moment.

They cry.

They are happy.

They are angry.

They are sad.

They laugh.

And then something else happens.

The emotion comes and goes without necessarily becoming a permanent self.

The child is not always thinking, I am an angry person.

They are simply angry.

They are not always thinking, I am a sad person.

They are simply sad.

The experience moves.

And they move with it.

Just in awareness.

Moving in awareness.

This is what makes childhood so beautiful.

Not that children are somehow perfect, or untouched by suffering, but that they can still show us what it means to experience life before every experience becomes a definition of who we are.

This is what adults long for.

To return to the place where life does not have to be constantly interpreted, judged, defended, or explained.

To simply be here.

To be alive.

As God.

With God.

Walking in God.

And perhaps the tragedy is not that children eventually grow up.

It is that we sometimes teach them to leave this place before they have even had the chance to know they were there.

How beautiful that time is.

And how short its existence on this earth.