For What It's Worth

Finding Inner Peace

(8 minute read)

Key Takeaways:

• Inner peace is not the absence of conflict but the result of facing pain, confusion, and contradiction with honesty.
• Our personal history — family, religion, trauma, and identity — shapes our inner turmoil, but it does not have to define our destination.
• Real peace comes from learning to see beyond temporary struggles and trusting that meaning can emerge even from suffering.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” 

— Henry David Thoreau

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” 

— Marcel Proust

The Long Revision

Writing is an endlessly intriguing practice that never ceases to surprise me. It is yet another doorway to creativity — a different channel that fulfills and stretches.

Lately, it’s the stretching part.

Take the headline of this piece, for example. The idea floated as an idea long before the actual writing began. But once I typed it out the headline stared blankly back at me. So the wait began. Then a few words began to form, slowly growing into a sentence. Then two. Finally, a full paragraph formed.

After stringing together a few of those, it became clear that the original idea needed to change. Something else needed to be said. The headline you now see did not appear at the start.

This article arrived the way so many do: in scattered fragments. Like a songwriter, stringing together pithy little phrases that rise up, rich with private meaning. The ideas feel important, yet are surprisingly hard to translate. Fragments become the bare bones — the skeleton — that slowly wraps with the flesh of what is eventually written.

Like a lens slowly adjusting, the piece comes together and I soon realized that the process itself was mirroring the journey of self-discovery: clarity, then uncertainty, gradually being clarified through attention and revision.

It turns out that a little lostness at the beginning is not a failure of direction, but the start of understanding.

A journey suggests a path with an eventual destination. It would be ideal if we had a clear headline from the outset, but what we want and what ultimately proves true are not always the same. Much of what is being written in us — through experience, choice, and time — remains invisible until we pause enough to reflect and look back at where we have come from.

When Certainty Begins to Crack

Self‑exploration begins for many reasons. For instance, growing up my inner world and the world I was born into didn’t seem to match. Both felt like utter chaos. Yet, there was always an inexplicable sense of purpose.

It’s clearer to me now where that sense of purpose came from — a blend of nature and nurture. I was born into a period that, to my preteen mind, felt like relentless social upheaval. The 1960s and ’70s were defined by political and cultural conflict; society itself seemed always on the brink of change.

There were wars playing out — both in the culture and inside my family. I was the first child of teenage parents: a sixteen‑year‑old mother and a seventeen‑year‑old father.

My siblings arrived just two and four years later. By the time my parents were nineteen and twenty, they had three children under the age of five. Three very young kids, being raised by two people who were, in many ways, still kids themselves.

By today’s standards it may seem quaint to read, but my teenage parents’ families were literally born on opposite sides of the tracks. It’s now a bike and walking trail, but the physical demarcation is still there.

The paternal family is Catholic French‑Irish and the maternal is Methodist German‑English. You can probably see where this is headed.

From day one, the religious divide between the families was evident. As I grew older, and the stories being told became more known, it became painfully clear that religious differences were an issue. Family members on both sides were openly critical of the other and their faith.

I later learned that my birth sparked an intense family discussion: In which religion would I be baptized? To honor both sides, a kind of King Solomon compromise was reached — I would be baptized into both traditions. Same God, different communities.

Of course, that compromise settled very little. The schism between the families would last for the rest of their natural lives.

For years, I believed I was to blame for the tension between families. That personal conviction only deepened the unintended consequence of two very young teenagers’ impulsive choices.

You were a mistake, my mother once said to me.

That was the starting point.

One God, Two Religions

The question that started it all was how could both sides of the family believe in the same God, yet carry such deep resentment toward one another?* To the young mind, the central command of faith — love one another — seemed painfully absent. How could there be one God, yet two convictions be divided by so much distrust?

For decades, that question became the cornerstone of a personal search. It led into a formal study of meaning and belief, eventually resulting in both undergraduate and graduate degrees in theology. Along the way, it also shaped a philosophy. In simple terms, this search helped to create a grounded, confident, and centered human being. It brought an inner peace that sits at the heart of daily life. The result is deep contentment — not because Nirvana’s been reached; but because of a final settlement within.

Of course, there are some things that still unsettle me: my odd dreams of zombies and vampires, or wandering high school hallways, lost without a class schedule. Even more fever dreams of being back in the radio booth, working as a DJ, scrambling to find the next record or ad copy while “dead air” hangs over the airwaves. And yes, occasionally the TV hears my scorn over something a politician said days or weeks ago. They cannot hear it, but sometimes I let them have it anyway.

Even with all that, something has genuinely shifted: I have learned to choose peace — and more often than not, it holds.

To Infinity and Beyond

Peace is held up as a central promise in just about every major religion. The idea is that it can be reached if we are willing to move through, not around, the many obstacles that stand in the way. One path to peace is learning to face and embrace both physical and emotional pain.

I do not know what it is like to grow up with economic or social privileges. But I do know this: barring any true impediment, every human being has the capacity to recognize who they are. We can sense what we long to become. And we can feel, often painfully, the vast distance between those two realities. We see it in the young adult who feels certain of who they are inside, yet struggles to reconcile that truth with the expectations placed upon them.

Angst and pain can rise from this awareness — the gap between knowing who we are now and who we hope to be. We sense the immense distance we must travel to close that gap. Regardless of our circumstances or advantages, this is an experience almost all of us share. Accepting this truth, rather than denying or numbing it away, offers a powerful beginning on the road to inner peace.

At first, the thought that we may never see everything clearly can be unsettling. Not understanding, not having an explanation for every event, makes some of us deeply uncomfortable. Part of the human condition is a fierce pride in our ability to figure things out. This pride often springs from a desire to manage, predict, and control situations — especially those that, in the end, we simply cannot control.

I need to figure out how this bad thing happened to me. Then I can make sure it never happens again.

That approach can be helpful when it comes to the few things we can truly influence — our thoughts, choices, or immediate responses. But no amount of analysis or theory guarantees control over everything. The question that matters — the one that shapes our final answer — has it already begun and how well is it being written?

For many, real inner peace is living as though the ending has already been written — and choosing, day by day, to inhabit the present moment as the only moment. How we begin that journey, and how we eventually arrive, looks different for each. We can only tell our story, as honestly as we can.

Perhaps life is more like writing than we realize. Sometimes meaning falls into our laps all at once, with startling clarity. More often — if we are honest — it comes in fragments. Slowly, at odd hours, in unexpected places. Sometimes faint, like light that hasn’t quite reached us yet. But it comes. And when it does, we find the words.