What Kind of Peace Am I Actually Craving This Coming Year
A Meditation on Longing, Stillness, and the Year That Await
“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
How Rilke understood the question that peace was not a destination but an inner spaciousness that appears when we stop forcing answers and allow our deepest questions to ripen in their own time.
The Question That Won’t Leave Me
I often walk with this question as the days thin and the year exhales its last light. What kind of peace am I actually craving? Not the peace other people expect me to want. Not the peace that looks tidy enough to post about. I mean the one that belongs to me. The one that asks to be lived rather than declared.
Rilke once wrote that our deepest questions aren’t problems to be solved but rooms to be entered. So I sit with this one like it’s a door that only opens from the inside. I don’t want to rush it. I don’t want to force an answer that sounds admirable but isn’t true. I want to see what shape my longing takes when I stop managing it and simply listen.
Kind of Peace That Feels Honest
Some years I want rest. Other years I want courage. This year feels different. This year I feel a hunger for a quieter kind of peace. Not silence. Not withdrawal. Something closer to an inner settling. A peace that feels earned because it comes from honesty rather than exhaustion.
Thich Nhat Hanh would tell me to begin with my breath. He’d remind me that peace isn’t a distant aspiration but a practice of returning to the present moment. He might say the peace I crave is already here if I stop letting the next fear or the next news headline or the next personal disappointment pull me out of the life I’m actually living. I hear him, and I believe him, but believing doesn’t make the work easier.
Facing the Weather Within
Martha Nussbaum talks about peace as a kind of emotional literacy. She insists that if I want peace in the new year, I’ll need to name what disturbs me and face it without flinching. The unlabeled ache. The unmet grief. The quiet resentment. The way I sometimes betray myself by pretending I’m fine when I’m not. Peace, for her, is an achievement of the heart that comes when we stop running from our own weather. I don’t always enjoy hearing this, but I rarely find her wrong.
The Peace That Might Be Looking for Me
So I sit here, asking myself again. What kind of peace am I actually craving. If I’m honest, I think I want a peace that isn’t afraid of the truth. I want a peace that lets me walk into the year with a steadier spine. I want a peace that doesn’t require the world to behave but asks only that I show up whole. There’s something liberating about craving a peace that doesn’t depend on circumstance. It means it can be cultivated. It means it can be carried.
Rilke would probably say that peace isn’t a goal at all. He’d tell me it’s a byproduct of living the question well. If that’s true, then I suppose my task isn’t to choose a peace but to become the sort of person who can receive the peace that chooses me.
A Simple Vow for the Year Ahead
Maybe that’s enough for now. Maybe the peace I want this year is simply the courage to listen to my life without rushing to tidy its edges. Maybe I want to stop pretending that peace is something I need to earn through perfection. Maybe peace begins when I admit that my longing isn’t a flaw. It’s a compass.
The coming year will have its own storms. I know that. I think you know that too. But longing has always been a kind of lantern, and mine’s glowing a little brighter tonight as I sit with this question. I don’t need the final answer. I only need the willingness to stay with the question long enough for it to reveal who I’m becoming.
So I’ll enter this new year with a simple vow. I’ll listen. I’ll breathe. I’ll live the question with as much honesty as I can manage. And if peace appears, it won’t be because I chased it. It’ll be because I made room for it.
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