Peace Is the Present

You’ve got coffee. I’ve got a question.

Are you happy?

Really. How do you know?

What comes to mind when you think about happiness? Most of us imagine it as a destination:

When the job gets better,

When the house is finally clean,

When the kids are healthy again,

When the weight comes off,

When the bank account stops holding its breath.

We chase it, plan for it, and schedule it like a vacation, some distant 'someday when things finally settle down.'

But here’s the problem: you don’t get to live in someday. You also can’t relive your past either. The only moment you have is the one right in front of you, and in that moment, you get to choose.

Do you scroll instead of sleeping? Do you check your work email on your day off? Do you say "I love you" before it's too late? Do you kiss her goodnight, even when you're tired?

That’s your present. Not a gift wrapped in perfection, but just a moment—quiet, small, easy to notice, and even easier to overlook.

I’ve seen peace before.

I saw it in the lives of the priests who raised me in the tradition of Liberation Theology. They wore the same clothes every day, slept on floors, and stood in protest with nothing but a rosary and a spine. They weren’t stained-glass saints. They were tired, flawed, and deeply human. Some cursed, others wept after Mass. But they stayed. They kept showing up because to them, peace isn’t the absence of struggle, but the decision not to run from it.

But what happens when that choice is taken away?

In another corner of the world, another man lived in that same stillness, though not by choice.

Clive Wearing was a brilliant conductor, musician, and husband until, one day, his memory vanished. A sudden illness stripped away nearly all of it. He couldn’t recall what had just happened, and he couldn’t anticipate what was coming next. He was suspended in the now, cut off from both his past and his future.

Doctors gave him a journal, hoping he might cling to something solid. He tried.

 “10:05 AM – Now I am really, completely awake.”

 “10:07 AM – Now I am really, completely awake.”

He forgot he had already written it. Each moment felt like a distant stranger. And yet, somehow, two things remained: his love for Deborah, and music.

Every time he saw his wife, his face lit up with the astonishment of first love. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t recall her name or their story. His soul recognized her. He once left her the same message seventeen times in an hour: “I love you. I miss you. Come soon.”

He couldn’t describe joy. But he could live it. He couldn’t recall conducting a symphony. But when shown a video of himself mid-performance, there he was: eyes closed, utterly immersed in the music. He wasn’t aware of the moment, but he was inside it.

Clive didn’t choose presence. He was locked inside it. It wasn’t peaceful. It was tragic, repetitive, disorienting. And yet, in that stripped-down reality, what remained were the most basic elements of being alive: love, art, and connection. The things that only need feelings, not memory or reason.

And that’s the part that stays with me.

Because we, the fortunate ones, have the chance to choose the present. We get to step into it, again and again. Clive didn’t have that choice. And yet, he may have lived more honestly in the moment than most of us ever will. So, what’s our excuse?

Maybe it’s not about how much we accumulate, how well we can explain ourselves, or how much we remember. Maybe it’s about what we carry in the quietest part of ourselves when everything else falls away.

Because happiness is always somewhere out there, always becoming, slightly beyond reach. But peace is different. Peace can’t be found in the past, and it doesn’t exist in the future. It is only here. Inside this breath, this choice, and this moment you are living right now.

So this Sunday morning, skip the search for happiness. Feel the weight of the coffee cup. Look outside and notice the warped, collapsing shapes in the dirty snow. Maybe that’s enough.

Unlike Clive, we get to choose.

Peace isn’t perfect. It’s quiet, unremarkable, and always where we are, only if we stop trying to be somewhere else.

Until next Sunday.