A short while ago, someone posted something on social media that felt unkind to me.
It was a slanted half-truth — just enough distortion to sting.
I don’t know this person well. I suspect they were moving from their own unresolved pain. Still, it hurt.
It was passive-aggressive. Aimed.
And I found myself asking the old question:
What did I do to deserve this?
I cried.
I ranted.
For a moment — maybe longer than a moment — I let myself feel betrayed.
Then I looked up.
The monks’ 2,300-mile Walk for Peace caught my attention.
There I was, sitting in my small private storm. And there they were — walking softly across the country with one steady intention: to bring peace to a nation in pain.
Something in me shifted.
Not because my hurt disappeared. It didn’t. There is still a tiny sting — but only if I feed it.
What shifted was my attention.
That post — that proverbial straw — brought me to my knees. And strangely, that was the blessing.
Because when everything went quiet, I remembered something I’ve known for years but sometimes forget in the heat of the moment:
I decide where to place my awareness.
I decide what I amplify.
I decide where my energy lives.
It took a few days. Days of hearing the old programming whisper, not good enough, not good enough. Days of owning my reaction instead of projecting it outward.
Each time the thoughts resurfaced, I gently redirected myself — back to the monks, back to their quiet footsteps, back to something larger than my wounded pride.
Peace does not require that the world behave kindly.
It asks only that I choose consciously.
Gabor Maté once said, We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.
This time, I did.
We don’t transcend our pain by pretending it didn’t happen.
We sit with it. We breathe. We return to ourselves again and again.
And slowly, something softens.
The memories may remain.
But the pain no longer drives the car.
Hope enters quietly like that — not as fireworks, but as steadiness.
What began as a wound became a doorway.
His actions opened it.
I chose to walk through.
This reflection lives alongside the larger body of work I’m shaping: Coming Home to Myself, a book in progress exploring embodiment, frequency, grief, sovereignty, and the quiet courage of belonging to oneself.