Peace that doesn't end

A Facebook post once asked: “What two words would you say to your younger self?”
My answer was simple: Be peaceful.

I’ve been seeking peace for as long as I can remember. Recently I found it. And yet my life prior to this has been anything but peaceful. I am prone to intensity, to enthusiasm, to moods that rise and fall like storms. Even when I find peace, it carries a note of the extreme, more crescendo than calm.

When I first began making peace a priority, I found two versions of it.

The first was winter-peace: cold, pragmatic, detached. It said, “Death is inevitable. Let go, move on.” It calmed me like an ice pack against a swollen ankle. But in its chill I lost some of my humanity.

The second was summer-peace: wild, hot, all-consuming. Everything mattered. Decay as much as bloom, endings as much as beginnings. In this state I loved everything so much that it brought me a strange peace. But it burned itself out quickly, too much intensity to hold.

Both were temporary. Conditional. I am peaceful if… If I am loved enough, safe enough, reassured enough. This isn’t peace at all, just my wounds momentarily quieted.

Real peace, I’ve learned, isn’t conditional. It doesn’t arrive when everything is calm or when someone else holds us in their arms. It just is.

But here’s the paradox: the harder you look for it, the more it runs. Peace is like a deer in the forest. Chase it, and it flees. Sit still, and it might wander close.

So I stopped chasing. I prayed, I breathed, I sat. And slowly I noticed that peace was not somewhere far away. It was already here, underneath the chaos, constant and unshakable, not even calling itself peace. It just is.

I claim it, and then it slips away. But the truth is, it never leaves. Peace doesn’t need chasing. It only needs stillness, a resting back into what was here all along.