Letters to My Son: Find Peace in the Mud

My dear son,

You spend so much of your life leaning forward. Your neck is perpetually strained, eyes fixed on a horizon that recedes the moment you take a step toward it. It is a tiring way to exist. You are waiting for the next thing, the better thing, the moment where the fog clears and the path becomes a paved road with clear signage. But the signage is a lie. The path is often just more mud, and the fog is merely the atmosphere we were born to breathe.

I want to tell you the only truth I have managed to scrape together after all these years of walking in circles. You do not always have to know what comes next. In fact, most of the time, you cannot know. To pretend otherwise is a form of exhaustion you don’t need to carry.

Sometimes, the only thing required of you is to be exactly where you are. Even if where you are is a place of stillness, or silence, or profound uncertainty. It is okay to be there. It is the only place that actually exists.

We are taught to worship the “next.”

We treat the present like a waiting room, a sterile place where we thumb through old magazines while waiting for our real life to be called into the office. We think, when I finish this degree, when I get that job, when I find that person, then I will begin.

But the waiting room is the life.

The chair you are sitting in, the way the floor feels under your boots, the specific ache in your shoulders — that is the totality of the journey. If you spend your whole life skipping the “now” to get to the “then,” you will find that when you finally arrive at your destination, you have become a ghost. You will have no substance left to enjoy the arrival because you practiced non-existence for so long.

There is a strange, stark beauty in accepting yourself right here, in this messy, unfinished moment. You are a work in progress, yes, but even a half-finished house provides shelter from the rain. You do not need to wait for the roof to be tiled and the walls to be painted before you allow yourself to sit by the fire.

You are working toward things. I know this. It is the human condition to stir the pot, to try to make something edible out of the scraps we are given. But I hope you can remember that finding peace in this very second is just as vital as the miles you intend to cover tomorrow.

If you cannot find peace in the mud, you will not find it on the mountain top.

The mountain is just more ground, only higher up and harder to breathe on. The peace is not in the geography. It is in the recognition that you are here, breathing, still capable of witnessing the light change from grey to black.

We are so afraid of standing still.

We think if we stop moving, we will vanish. We think the universe demands constant momentum. But the earth turns whether you run or sit. The stars do not care about your productivity. There is a dignity in the pause. There is a profound honesty in saying, “I do not know where I am going, but I am here.”

What does it mean to accept yourself?

It isn’t a grand, cinematic gesture. It isn’t a swell of violins. It is usually much quieter and much more difficult. It is the act of looking at your failures, your hesitations, and your sheer, baffling persistence, and not turning away in disgust.

It is looking at the man in the mirror and saying, “So, it’s you again.”

There is beauty in that. Not the beauty of a sunset or a painting, but the beauty of a stone that has been washed by the sea for a thousand years. It is smooth. It is durable. It has no illusions about being anything other than a stone.

When you stop fighting the reality of your current position, you save a tremendous amount of energy. You can use that energy to simply look around. You might notice things you missed while you were busy sprinting. You might notice the way the wind moves through the grass, or the specific way a cup of tea loses its warmth. These small, mundane observations are the only things that keep us tethered to the world.

I am writing this because I see you trembling with the effort of trying to outrun your own shadow. You want answers. You want a map. I have no map to give you. I mislaid mine years ago, and I have found that I prefer the wandering.

The path ahead is a ghost. It hasn’t happened yet.

The past is a graveyard. It is already gone.

All you have is this thin, precarious sliver of time called “now.” It is small, but it is solid.

Don’t be afraid of the silence of the journey. Don’t be afraid of the moments where nothing seems to be happening. Those are the moments where you are actually being forged. The hammer doesn’t always have to strike the anvil; sometimes the metal just needs to sit in the heat and change color.

I want you to be okay with the “not knowing.” I want you to look at the vast, terrifying blank space of your future and say, “I will get there when I get there, but for now, I am here.”

Be kind to yourself in the stillness. It is the hardest work you will ever do.

Look at your hands. They are there. They are real. They move because you tell them to. This is the starting point. Everything else is a theory. We spend so much time theorizing about our lives that we forget to inhabit them. You are not a character in a book waiting for the next chapter.

We think the destination will fix us.

We think the “there” is better than the “here” because “there” is where the imagined version of ourselves lives. But when you get “there,” you take yourself with you. You take your doubts, your hunger, and your strange habit of looking for the next thing. You cannot escape yourself by changing your zip code or your job title.

There is a specific kind of courage required to stay still. It is easy to be busy. It is easy to fill the day with noise and movement so you don’t have to hear the heartbeat of the world. But in the stillness, you find what is essential. You find the core of your own being, which is often much quieter and more resilient than you gave it credit for.

If you can find peace in this moment, you are successful. I don’t care about the rest. The money, the accolades, the things people say about you when you leave the room — those are all echoes. The only thing that is real is the peace you carry inside your own skin while you wait for the light to change.

I am still here, by the window. The light is almost gone. It is a good evening to be nowhere in particular.

Stay where you are for a while, son. It’s a good place to be.

Dad

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This post was previously published on medium.com.