Peace be with you

Peace: freedom from disturbance; tranquility.

Tranquility: the quality or state of being calm.

I love the final week of December. The historian in me loves looking back to analyze the different causes and effects of the year. Normally, I am full of goals and hopes for the next year, but these past two years have shifted my perspective. I am not pessimistic or disillusioned, as so many are after the trials of 2020 and 2021 - trust me, I’ve had my moments - but I am finding clarity amidst the (is it just me, or does it seem to be increasing?) chaos. 


My only goal for 2021 was to survive. I remember talking to my husband at the end of 2020 and telling him I couldn’t imagine setting any goals for myself because everything seemed too hopeless and hard. In the span of three weeks, my brother had nearly died in an accident, my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and I was facing life-altering surgery with a substantial physical and emotional recovery. Daily life felt insurmountable. What should have been a peaceful winter break, filled with family from afar, turned into a nightmare. I felt nothing but hesitance to face a new day because of the potential it held, acknowledging just how quickly the life we take for granted can dissolve.


And then, despite the impossibility of it all, time passed. Time, in its suit and tie, commuting to work every day between sunrise and sunset, punching its card for a shift change in the sleepless hours between sunset and sunrise. A silent juggernaut.


In a year when I feel like nothing went right and I have been a disaster more often than not, I looked back during this last week of December, 2021 and realized that I met my goal. I survived. I’m here, after a very long and complicated recovery. My mom is here, after receiving the best cancer diagnosis one can hope for and completing her treatment just as I went back to work in April. My brother is here, promoted to Colonel just five months after his potentially life-ending accident. We are here. 


I was so scared during the last week of December 2020. I was terrified that this life as I knew it would be over. And I was right.


Life, as I knew it in 2020, is over, and I am better for it. I am not the same person I was and neither is my mom, nor my brother. We are stronger, calmer, and more at peace with our lives than ever before. Somehow, amid the complete and total chaos, the abysmal fear, the confrontation with mortality…we found peace.


That is my 2022 wish to you, my friends. I hope you find peace. For there is so much more beyond our fears and we don’t have to be brave enough to face them, we just have to survive.

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