Choose Peace: How Will You Show Up?
“The world needs your presence more than your perfection.” — John O’Donohue
As the year begins to exhale, I keep returning to a question that feels both ancient and startlingly current: What does it mean to create — and be peace — not only for ourselves but in the midst of a fragmented and complex world?
Being peace is the embodied choice to meet life — all of it — with awareness and tenderness, grounded and kind, willing to meet what’s here rather than what we wish were here. A way of being with ourselves and one another through presence that acknowledges our diversity and keeps us rooted in our shared humanity. As my favorite poet and author John O’Donohue reminds us: “The world needs our presence more than our perfection.”
Yet we all know how easily we drift. How quickly the world can tug us into reactivity and pull us back into old patterns, automatic habits, assumptions and judgments that narrow our perspective and lead us toward contraction as well as confrontation.
And while this path isn’t about denying what hurts or hiding what’s true, it calls us to meet each moment with as much compassion and clarity as we can: less about turning away and more about remembering — how we can return again and again with a caring heart.
As the new year comes into view, I find myself looking back and asking: Where did reactivity take the lead? Where was I closed or quick to judge? Where was I quick to dismiss or label instead of pausing to understand? What shifted in me — including how I related to what was around me — when I returned to being fully present?
These moments, when we feel contracted and tight, point to the deeper honesty of embodying peace: that the foundation of inner peace grows from awareness. From here, we pause to contemplate — softening where we can, refining how we respond and intentionally returning to present-moment reality with deeper clarity and wisdom. And it’s in the simplest, everyday interactions that this inner work becomes our practice.
A few weeks ago, I was in New York and spent time with friends I hadn’t seen in months. It was a meaningful visit as I felt a deep ease knowing they had come through some difficult health challenges. At one point my son called and after I hung up my friend said, “Wow. I love how you spoke to your son!” (For a moment, I thought he was poking fun at me!) But he had genuinely noticed how I offered my son the gift of time — encouraging him to stay at his office rather than rush uptown for a very quick goodbye before my early-morning return to San Francisco. What really struck me was how that simple exchange — witnessed by dear friend — revealed something more powerful: a glimpse of how a peaceful way of communicating can transform the moment and the people within it.
Experiences like these aren’t rare when we’re moving from a place of presence. They show up in the smallest exchanges — the way we listen, how we acknowledge others or how we soften to let someone else’s needs take their rightful space without collapsing the moment into our own experience. And as we practice these moments of presence with dedication, we begin to experience the upside of walking in the footsteps of peace — creating space for more humanity, more understanding and more relational ease — within ourselves, within what we hold sacred and between us.
With a new year on the horizon, we return to where we began: Choose peace. How will you show up so that your future self will look back and thank you for the choices you make now?
