Peace In The Margins

This has been a winter to remember.

The kind of winter that, decades from now, we’ll reference with a knowing smile and say, “I remember when…”

It was a hard one by any measure. Frozen RV water lines. Trudging through nearly a foot of snow just to reach a water source. Moving slowly – carefully – across sheets of ice that threatened to send us sliding with one wrong step. Learning how to stay warm inside what is, at the end of the day, a metal box in the middle of winter.

And yet, as difficult as it was, this winter came bearing a lesson we didn’t know we needed.

Slow down.

When you’re snowed in – truly snowed in – your choices narrow. You can’t rush. You can’t force forward motion. You wait. You breathe. You accept that some days are not meant for productivity or progress, but for presence.

Waiting, it turns out, isn’t the enemy we make it out to be.

There is peace in falling snow.

Peace in a landscape stripped to white.

Peace in the quiet that follows when the world feels hushed and held.

Right now, while winter tightens its grip, a different kind of movement is happening elsewhere. A group of Buddhist monks are walking, step by deliberate step, from Texas toward Washington, D.C. Today, they pass through Richmond, Virginia. Their journey is not loud. It is not hurried. It is a Walk for Peace.

One monk has shared a daily mantra with the world:

“Today will be my peaceful day.”

He encourages people to write it down each morning. To live it, not as a wish, but as a decision. He reminds us that peace unravels the moment we allow others to disrupt it. No one can give us peace. No one can take it away. Peace is a choice we must make, again and again, for ourselves.

There’s something deeply powerful about that message arriving in the middle of a historic winter storm.

Both the storm and the walk ask the same thing of us:

Slow your pace.

Be intentional.

Choose how you move through the world.

In the stillness of snow, in the discipline of each step taken toward peace, we’re reminded that chaos does not get the final word. That even when the world feels frozen, uncertain, or heavy, peace is still available to us in the quiet, in the pause, in the simple act of being.

So today, as snow falls and footsteps continue somewhere down the road, I’m choosing to believe this:

Today will be my peaceful day.

And tomorrow, I’ll choose it again.