(Photo by Rachel McDermott on Unsplash)
The Road to Peace
(10 minute read)
Key Takeaways:
- Uncertainty is universal. Every generation has faced it; we are not uniquely burdened — we are merely human.
- Our fears are largely self-inflicted. The mind imagines threats that reality rarely delivers. Name them and they begin to lose their grip.
- Acceptance is not surrender. Turning toward discomfort, rather than fleeing it, is the only reliable path through it.
- Inner peace is not hidden. There is no secret technique, no guru, no revelation waiting. It may be just a shift in perspective away.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.” –Blaise Pascal, Pensées
“The things you think about controls the quality of your mind. You become your thoughts.”
–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.16
“It is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment about it. And this you have the power to change.” –Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.47
“There are more things likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” –Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius
What a World
Music has always been more than just inspiration. Like many teenagers of my generation, there were magical moments spent listening to the stereo. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, absorbed in the album liner notes, the music buffered the outside world. At night, a small AM transistor radio concealed beneath my pillow took me to far away places, eventually rocking me to sleep.
My generation, perhaps more than any other, kept the recording industry afloat. Over the decades, we dutifully bought the same music again and again — vinyl replaced by 8-track or cassette tapes, those swapped out for CDs. Now the CDs collect dust, the entire library supplanted by digital downloads. For what once bought a single album, we now have access to virtually everything ever recorded, old and new, delivered instantly across all our devices.
What a world we live in.
Embracing the Unknown
With all that alone time, I’ve learned to cultivate what psychologists call “inner monologue” — the private, ongoing stream of thought most of us experience but rarely examine. It is a cognitive tool for memorization, self-control, and critical thinking, and ultimately the inner voice that shapes who we are and what we will become.
Blaise Pascal — mathematician, physicist, and philosopher — believed that many of us avoid being alone with our thoughts because doing so forces us to confront our fears and doubts. Instead, we reach for distractions: career ambitions, imagined conflicts, vices. These are placebos, and they leave us feeling unfulfilled.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca argued that these fears are largely self-inflicted. Our capacity for reason — including the ability to imagine future events — is a gift, but it comes with a price when we fill it with fears of uncertainty.
We worry about outcomes we cannot control, inventing scenarios that may never come to pass. The anticipation of a dreaded event is almost always worse than the event itself.
Awareness that we are prone to this way way of thinking is the first step in changing this behavior. Recognizing the inner monologue — and the unfortunate tendency we have to avoid rather than face our fears — gives us a chance to change it.
Uncertainty is universal. The older we get, the more we understand that very little is guaranteed — job loss, the death of loved ones, disappointments accumulate. Learning to master our response by embracing the unknown can profoundly improve our quality of life.
Be Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
Fears, worries, and doubts have a way of crowding out joy and peace of mind.
A joyful life means different things depending on who you ask.
- In psychology, it generally means well-being — positive emotions and a broad sense of satisfaction with life
- In philosophy, it is fulfilled through virtue, realizing our potential, and belonging to something larger than ourselves
- In evolutionary science, joy drives development and connection — rooted in the same brain regions that govern reward and emotional regulation
- In religious traditions, joy is distinct from circumstantial happiness — a deep, abiding assurance that endures even through suffering
- In sociology, joy is relational — it emerges from the strength of our social bonds, our empathy, and our service to others
Notice what all five definitions have in common: they describe joy as something achievable. That’s reassuring — and quietly dangerous. For all its richness, the pursuit of joy carries a hidden hazard: the moment we define what it should look like, we give ourselves something to fall short of.
Whatever joy means to you, there is one obstacle worth noting: the belief that we should always be living in bliss, and the self-judgment that follows when we come up short. Measuring our lives against an ideal is one of the surest ways to undermine peace of mind. The desire for joy can quietly curdle into condemnation.
Unmet expectations produce a range of responses — anger, blame, grief, resignation. But the conclusion is often the same: “something must be wrong with me.” More often than not, the real problem is setting unrealistic standards.
If we do it wisely, pursuing joy doesn’t have to be such hard work.
Some consider introspection — “navel-gazing” — a sign of weakness. They have a point, up to one: the universe owes us nothing. Joy, sadness, love, fear rise and fall, ebb and flow. That’s not a flaw — it’s a feature and the rhythm of being human.
When discomfort arrives, we have two options — the same ones wired into us from the beginning: face it or flee.
Avoidance feels safe. We retreat into the familiar, repeat our private mantras, and hope the unpleasantness fades on its own.
Acceptance works differently. When we turn toward our fears with curiosity rather than resistance, we begin to loosen their hold.
Acceptance doesn’t mean surrender. It means making room for both the welcome and the unwelcome — acknowledging that both are part of a full life. With that openness, we can examine our fears honestly — weigh them against our values and decide which deserve our attention.
Learning to accept uncertainty begins with learning to sit with discomfort — to be comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. Not to wrestle uncertainty into submission, but to approach it with openness — curious about why it’s there and willing to do what it takes to move through it.
The Strategy
There is no magic wand, no Jedi mind trick, no amount of prayer that dissolves uncertainty on its own. Like so many things, the strategy takes root when we admit a problem exists, we have to own it — honestly and without excuse. It’s ours to carry, and ours to put down.
Face It
Whatever stands between you and peace has to be faced. Ignoring it, battling it, or pretending it isn’t there offers no lasting relief. Courage here isn’t the absence of fear — it’s the willingness to stop looking away and face it.
Sheryl Crow admitted to severe stage fright early in her career. She would stare at her shoes through entire performances, too terrified to acknowledge the crowd. It took a serious medical crisis to finally give her the courage to look up. She now mentors young artists, using exercises built around something that once paralyzed her: making eye contact while performing.
Kurt Cobain struggled with it too. In early shows he turned his back to the audience entirely, singing toward the drummer or the back wall. It took months before he could face the crowd — and even then, he rarely looked up. In an era of outsized rock egos, that unassuming quality became part of what made him so compelling.
Identify It
Acknowledging that fear exists is one thing. Identifying and knowing what it actually is — that’s another.
Naming a fear strips it of its vagueness, and vagueness is what gives fear its power. As Ryan Holiday writes in The Obstacle Is The Way: “Vague fear is sufficient to deter us. The more it is explored, the less power it has over us.” Once named, a fear becomes something we can actually work with.
Seneca took this further with a practice he called premeditatio malorum — the premeditation of evils. The exercise involves deliberately imagining the loss of what we value most: health, relationships, security. It sounds grim, but the effect is the opposite. By staring down worst-case scenarios, we build resilience, reduce anxiety, and deepen gratitude for what we already have.
Observe It
Facing and naming our fears opens the door. What comes next — studying them with honest curiosity — is where the real work begins.
A technique that has served me well: when something is blocking your peace, imagine holding it in your hand like an apple. Observe it. Describe it in detail. The act of objectifying the fear separates it from your identity — it becomes a thing outside of you, not a defining part of who you are. Your better self has no room for it.
The inner dialogue might go something like: So this is what it looks like. Here’s how it affects me. I wonder how it got here — and what it would mean to finally let it go. Strange at first, but remarkably clarifying.
Change It
Here’s the quiet revelation: by the time you reach this step, most of the heavy lifting is done. The facing, the naming, the examining — those were the hard parts. What remains is simply to stop fighting and allow stillness to do its work and allow change to take hold.
“All of humanity’s problems,” wrote Pascal, “stem from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room.”
Stillness.
“The Buddhist word for it was upekkha. The Muslims spoke of aslama. The Hebrews, hishtavut. The second book of the Bhagavad Gita, the epic poem of the warrior Arjuna, speaks of samatvam, an ‘evenness of mind — a peace that is ever the same.’ The Greeks, euthymia and hesychia. The Epicureans, ataraxia. The Christians, aequanimitas.
“In English: stillness. To be steady while the world spins around you. To act without frenzy. To hear only what needs to be heard. To possess quietude — exterior and interior — on command.”
–Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is The Key
“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” –Franz Kafka, Zürah Aphorisms, 109, 1916-18
Forcing your way through fear — bullying it, outthinking it, willing it into submission — rarely works alone. The mind spinning its own wheels gets nowhere. Stillness isn’t passivity; it’s the only ground sturdy enough to stand on.
The Human Condition
One hazard of the human condition is the ability to imagine the future. We envision our ideal self, then measure where we stand today against that vision. For many of us, the gap is vast — and that chasm itself becomes the source of our greatest anxiety.
Whatever we believe about our origins, we begin by being grateful. The universe can seem harsh and random. That we are here at all warrants some level of appreciation.
There is nothing hidden — no secret waiting to be discovered.
“We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
–Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
As a teenager, sitting cross-legged on the floor with an album in my lap, I had no idea I was already practicing this. The music held the uncertainty at bay long enough for something quieter to settle in. That stillness was always there. It still is.
Editor’s note: This post was originally titled Embrace The Journey: Lasting Inner Peace and published on 9/27/2023. It has been edited for clarity and continuity.
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