Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: “Many people think excitement is happiness. But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.”
The first time this landed, I was sitting in an early session at Banyan, having had what I thought was a pretty good meditation, and I realized I didn’t actually know what peace felt like. I knew what excitement felt like. I had spent my adult life chasing it — the next thing, the spike, the reward at the end of the grind. I knew what relief felt like. I knew what the temporary absence of pain felt like, which I had confused with peace for years. But peace itself, as a quality of being rather than a condition you arrive at — that was unfamiliar.
The achievement model we’re handed sells excitement as the goal. Get the thing, feel the rush, repeat. And the rush is real — the dopamine is real, the satisfaction is real. But it fades. It always fades. And then you need the next thing to recreate the state. Dan Harris titled his book 10% Happier in part because he was making an honest claim: not transformation, not permanent bliss, just incrementally more capacity for equanimity. His publisher wanted a bigger promise. He refused, because what he was describing wasn’t peak experiences. It was ground.
Sylvia Boorstein — a founding teacher at Spirit Rock, whose warmth and humor have made the dharma accessible to generations of practitioners — says it plainly: “Don’t just do something, sit there.” Peace isn’t achieved. It’s practiced. It’s discovered when you stop moving long enough to notice it’s already there underneath the noise.
In recovery, I learned something that rhymes with this: we let others love us until we can love ourselves. There was a period when I couldn’t generate peace on my own — my interior weather was too loud, too chaotic. But someone believing in me, someone holding the possibility that I was worth caring about when I couldn’t hold it myself, was a kind of borrowed peace. You lean on it while your own capacity builds.
Peace is different from the absence of problems. Problems continue. The waves keep coming — more on that in the next post. Peace is the quality of ground you stand on while the waves come. Not higher ground that keeps you dry. Just solid enough to stay upright.
You can’t get there later. It’s only available now. That’s not a limitation. That’s the access point.
