Vachon Imagined

When we close our eyes, we remember.

We remember what it felt like to be loved by our relatives. What it felt like to hear the sounds of carnivals, laughter, even anticipation.

How do we hear these things?

Memory.

We experience these things through memory.

And this impresses upon us yet again that nothing is happening in quite the way we often think it is.

It is relieving to put memory onto someone—to make someone else responsible for what we carry, whether we call that memory good or evil. But the relief does not last long.

Eventually, the memory returns.

And often, it returns in a fiery rage.

Why?

Because it has not been released. It has not been forgiven.

Talking about it can make it brighter. We can give it more attention, more shape, more authority.

So where do we go when we want to move to the next level of understanding—to the next viewpoint of triumph?

We go to God.

We go to the place where noise is allowed, but itself is not noise.

We go to the place where thinking and memory are allowed, but where the remembrance is not of ourselves, but of who we are.

And that remembrance saves us.

This stillness relinquishes our memories for us.

And nothing is without use to it.

Because just because you have moved on from something does not mean that it no longer exists in consciousness. “You” are still there. A version, a copy, an imprint of you still exists in the experience.

So we practice compassion.

Because we begin to understand that we never really kill our old self. We simply move on from it.

And when the next person picks up the same experience, we can listen.

Without interruption.

Without placing our own overlay upon it.

We can simply listen, in silence.

Or we can walk the experience with them through empathy—through direct experience—and offer our insight.

Not by telling them how they should have lived through it, but by showing them how we loved our way through it.

How we remembered.

How, in the process, we remembered who we were.