The Strangeness of Peace
The quiet around me is real. I am allowed to settle into it slowly, without bracing for what comes next.
Has peace, at first, felt uncomfortable to you? After a long time spent waiting for the next hard thing, the absence of crisis is disorienting. The body that learned to listen for footsteps in the hallway has not yet been told the hallway is empty. You may notice yourself standing very still in your own kitchen — listening, the way you learned — for something that is no longer there.
That is not a failure of healing. That is a nervous system catching up to a quieter life, on its own slow schedule. You cannot reason your body into trust. You can only let it find, in small repeated mornings, that the quiet holds.
The signs come gently. The morning that begins without dread. The afternoon you notice an hour has passed without your shoulders climbing. The small turn of the head when a door opens and your body does not flinch. The cup of something warm held longer than it used to be held. You can settle in. None of these arrive as a single moment of arrival. They arrive as a slow rearrangement of the inside of your days.
Let the quiet teach you what it is. You do not have to perform peace, or post it, or hold it up as proof of anything. You can simply be inside it, in your own kitchen, in your own light, in the ordinary shape of your own afternoon. Once: strangeness. Now: softening. Soon: the settled feeling that stays. You are dockside in your own harbor now. The light is on. The light has always been you.