Vachon Imagined

It only took one second.

Her aggression, without a word, sent a chilling message into the air, directly to the heart of the other woman for whom it was intended.

No poetry here. No plan of action. Just reaction.

An animalistic need to protect, no matter the situation.

A wrong order. A misplaced phone. A slight misunderstanding. People are killed.

Why?

Because people kill.

They kill in their minds. They kill people they desperately love. They kill, in their hearts, the making of their own kind.

We can establish rules. Laws. Religion. Constitutions. Thou shalt not.

And still, people kill.

Because the seed is there.

Water it enough, and it will act. It will respond.

And everything we thought we knew to be true can be over in an instant.

Lives change not because there are no rules, but because there is no discipline.

It does not matter what the person looks like. A Sunday school teacher. A kind neighbor. A giving mother. A good man. The seed is there.

And what we have learned to keep hidden does not stay hidden forever.

So we train the mind.

We train the body.

We learn to remain in being—the place within us that can work within the law without becoming imprisoned by reaction. The place where the mind can be reshaped before behavior follows it.

Because everyone has the capacity to kill.

The question is not whether the seed exists.

The question is how much time we will spend watering it.

How long will we sit with anger?

How long will we rehearse the harm?

How often will we return to the thought until the thought becomes a vessel capable of carrying it into the world?

We live in a world that justifies war. That sanctifies killing when it is convenient. That can call one death murder and another necessary.

But the individual still has a choice.

Not whether the seed exists.

Whether we will water it.

And so, the work is not simply to obey the rules.

It is to become disciplined enough to recognize what is happening inside us before it becomes what happens to someone else.

This is the individual call, to rally the heart of the brave, not the heart of the wicked.

Not because we are incapable of violence.

But because we are capable of choosing what we do with the violence that lives within us.