Last week I wrote about love. Another sentiment that reliably surfaces this time of year is peace. Like love, peace is a word we use often and define loosely, carrying weight but not precision. As I’ve written about before, how we define peace depends heavily on how we define the opposite of peace.
If we define the opposite of peace as war, then peace becomes the absence of armed conflict. If we define peace as the opposite as torment, it becomes tranquility, quiet, or rest. These definitions shape what we think we are pursuing—and how we might get there. Turmoil, whether inside us or between people or groups, rarely stays contained.
Hurt leaks, fear spills, and unresolved pain looks for somewhere to land. Within us, this comes out in families, workplaces, relationships– and in quiet moments alone that are deeply uncomfortable. On a societal level, we see it in cycles of violence and retaliation. Inner turmoil becomes external turmoil, escalating into conflict. As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people. Scaled up, organized, and equipped with weapons, wounded groups wound other groups– and that’s called war.
If we want peace among people, peace within ourselves is a starting point. Try this thought experiment: imagine a world filled with people like the Dalai Lama– every nation on earth filled with people dedicated to resolving inner conflict– led by politicians equally as dedicated. Now try to imagine two nations in such a world going to war– it’s impossible. No leader would go down that road (what is there to prove?) and no population would go along with it. Now, try the opposite thought experiment: every nation on earth is filled with angry, aggrieved people, led by more angry, aggrieved politicians. War, sooner or later, seems like an inevitability.
If the road to peace amongst us lies inside each of us, the road ahead is difficult. Pause for a second, and try to imagine what it would take for you, personally. Who would you need to forgive, and who would need to forgive you? What losses would we have to accept, and stop struggling against? What relationships would need to be repaired, and how difficult would that be to do? What past wrongs and injustices would we have to let go of? What ego-protective stories would we have to abandon? What practices that benefit us, but harm others, would we need to walk away from? Now imagine how difficult it will be to have everyone do that.
There is another irony worth sitting with here: inner peace often emerges through discomfort. We tend to imagine peace as something soft, gentle, and immediately relieving. And while peace may eventually feel that way, the path toward it often does not. It is marked by difficult conversations, grief, honesty, restraint, and the slow work of compassion—both toward others and ourselves. Getting to a place often does not feel particularly peaceful.
Perhaps this helps explain why peace is so often mistaken for mere absence. An absence of active conflict feels more achievable, less intimidating, and far less demanding than the inner work required to live honestly and compassionately. But absence falls short. There may be no active war between North and South Korea, yet few people standing at the border would describe the situation as peaceful. The tension is palpable; the quiet is brittle. Likewise, we may not be openly fighting with a spouse, neighbor, child, or parent—but that absence of conflict does not necessarily feel like peace.
We can suppress conflict, numb ourselves, or avoid hard truths and achieve a kind of quiet, an absence of conflict. But that quiet is unstable, requires constant vigilance, and cracks under pressure. After all, heroin leads to a certain type of peace or quiet–while high, people often feel an absence of worry or inner conflict—but no one would confuse addiction with a life of peace, or mistake numbness for fulfillment.
When peace is real, it is defined less by what is missing and more by what is present. Many of us have felt this presence before. We feel it in places that seem to hold something larger than us—churches, mountains, forests. I’ve written about feeling it among sequoia trees, where scale and time recalibrate our nervous systems. We feel it in the presence of certain people, as though peace emanates from them. We feel it when we know we are on the right path, doing work that matters, or contributing to something beyond ourselves. Ironically, peace often increases when we feel smaller—less central, less defended, more connected to something larger.
This helps explain why peace so often appears when we feel small—not diminished, but unburdened. Standing beneath a night sky or beside someone deeply grounded, the pressure to defend, prove, and maintain ourselves eases. The rigid sense of “me” softens. When we are less preoccupied with protecting our identity, the world feels less threatening. Peace emerges not because nothing is wrong, but because we are no longer at the center of everything.
Peace, in this sense, is not something we add to our lives. It is what remains when grasping loosens. When we stop demanding permanence from what is temporary, certainty from what is uncertain, or validation from a world that is indifferent to our stories, something inside us relaxes. This is not resignation or passivity, but clarity. And paradoxically, letting go often feels like fullness rather than loss, as though a constant inner effort has finally been set down.
Taken together, these experiences point toward a different understanding of peace. Peace grows when clinging loosens, when the sense of self becomes less rigid, and when we practice relating to life this way repeatedly over time. This is why peace cannot be forced, chased, or achieved once and for all. It is cultivated. It shows up in moments when we let go of being right, loosen our grip on old grievances, and step out of the stories that keep us locked in quiet inner conflict. Over time, this practice reshapes us—not into people untouched by difficulty, but into people less consumed by it.
Peace within us changes how we relate to others, and ripples outward. When we are less internally fragmented, less internally caught or conflicted, we are less reactive and escalate less quickly. When we escalate less quickly, conflict becomes more workable. Peace within does not guarantee peace without—but without it, peace without is nearly impossible.
If we take the season’s invitation to reflect on peace seriously, we might resist the temptation to define it narrowly or cheaply. Peace is not merely the silence after the noise stops. It is a steadiness that feels full rather than empty, grounded rather than fragile. It begins within us and radiates outward—and the more each of us finds it, the more there is to share. In fact, it may be impossible to increase peace in the world without first cultivating it ourselves.
Love,
Doc
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