Uneasy With Peace
Why peace feels dangerous when it finally arrives
She came to Friday’s call already changed.
Earlier that week she’d been doing a releasing exchange with someone, carrying the usual weight. A project. A deadline. The feeling of being behind. He asked her a plain question. “What are you without that story?”
And she caught herself. She’d been leaning forward the way you do in an argument, pushing, straining to force the thing into place. She watched her own energy sit back down. Her eyesight had gone blurry, then cleared. “I came back into my body,” she said, “and the situation with my eyes went away.” The task was still there. It just looked doable now. She found peace, and she was still in it when she arrived on the call.
“I’m at peace. And I’m uneasy with that.” A little on edge. Waiting. “Where’s the other shoe gonna drop?”
The mind does not trust peace. When the emergency passes, the part of you that stayed up watching for the next blow does not stand down. It reads the quiet as a trap. Surely this can’t last. Something is coming. The calm itself becomes the thing to brace against.
So we looked at it. That sense of something’s-about-to-happen. I asked whether it wasn’t just a thought. Where it sat in the body. A little sweat. A tightening in the belly. Could she let go of wanting it to mean anything at all.
“No,” she said.
Good. That’s honest. Underneath the unease she found fear. A fear of dying, when she looked at it. She let it be there. And then the question turned. Has peace ever gone anywhere? If peace is the thing everything else appears on, how would you lose it?
“I don’t know,” she said.
She didn’t argue her way to an answer. She never took the “no” back. The other shoe didn’t drop, and she stopped standing under it. When I asked how it felt, she said: happy. “Like the little kid.”