“Peace is not the absence of resistance, but learning not to judge yourself for being human.” ~ Unknown
I am on vacation as I write this.
My wife and I are parked next to a quiet lake in our RV, a small mobile version of our home. We’ve always loved this part: we can take our little piece of the world with us wherever we go. Our coffee mugs. Our blankets. Our favorite foods. Our routines. Those little familiar things that make an unfamiliar place feel like ours.
This morning the lake seemed perfectly still.
The rain pattered softly on the windows. The sky was gray and heavy in that familiar way that suggested the weather could turn for the worse before the day was over.
The forecast had to be perfect: mid-eighties, sunshine, the kind of weather people imagine when they think of peaceful weekends.
Yesterday was warm, but the wind was merciless. It’s not just airy. It was windy enough that we kept checking the awning. There was enough wind that the chairs had to be adjusted. It was windy enough to require a bit of control even to rest.
By this morning the rain had arrived early and there was talk of storms later as a cold front pushed through.
There was a version of myself, and if I’m being honest, sometimes still is, that would have quietly resisted all day because reality couldn’t cooperate with the expectation I had built up. Not dramatically. Only internally. That subtle tension. This is the invisible dispute with what is happening.
“It wasn’t supposed to go this way.”
I think there’s a lot of suffering in that sentence, not just the pain, but the pain, the resistance to change, and the simple fact that life doesn’t conform to the script we’ve written for it.
And often resistance to our own reactions.
The disappointment we think we shouldn’t feel. Frustration that we think we should have gotten over. The anxiety we think should be gone by now.
I did this with the weather forecast. But I’ve done it in relationships, work, grief, healing, and in my own head.
I could feel it when a conversation with my wife didn’t go the way I had hoped, and instead of simply admitting I was hurt or disagreeing, I started building a case in my head.
I felt it at work when one interruption turned into five and the planned day slowly disappeared.
I felt it when I woke up restless for no apparent reason and immediately started questioning why this was still happening. Is this still it? Are you still here? After all that practice? After all that breathing?
This is the part I don’t always like to admit, especially as someone who practices meditation and mindfulness.
I know how to take a break. I know how to breathe. I know how to notice a thought before it becomes one. I know the language of acceptance.
What I didn’t always realize was that I was trying to accept reality while quietly rejecting my own experience.
And I was still there: annoyed by the rain, checking the forecast again, trying to vent my frustration.
I used to think that letting go meant becoming untouchable. As if I meditated enough, reflected enough, and healed enough, eventually life wouldn’t affect me so deeply.
I thought awareness should make you calmer, more evolved, less reactive.
But somewhere along the way, even awareness seemed performative.
All difficult emotions were optimized. Every uncomfortable moment became a lesson that I had to make sense of. Every reaction had to pass through some invisible spiritual filter before I could allow myself to feel it.
Did I deal with attachment? Burning? Resistor? Deviation?
Another thing to fix?
It became exhausting. Not because awareness has no value, but because I have turned awareness into another control system.
Sometimes I did this in small, almost invisible ways.
Maybe a text didn’t come back as quickly as I’d hoped and I told myself I was watching my attachment. But really I was just frustrated and sometimes angry.
A plan changed at the last minute and I told myself to be flexible. But really, I was irritated.
There’s a kind of honesty that gets lost when everything has to become a lesson too quickly.
Behind all this was another fear: if I really let go, if I stop all reactions, then maybe I will stop caring.
Perhaps acceptance would make it passive. Maybe the peace would tear me apart. Maybe I’d be one of those people who can shrug everything off and call it wisdom.
But that never happened.
still interested. I cared about the day. I cared about my wife. I was interested in the time spent together.
What I began to understand was that letting go is never about caring less. It was about demanding less perfection from myself.
It was about letting myself be disappointed for a moment without turning my disappointment into another personal failure.
It was the real thing that I finally started to see.
I wasn’t just resisting reality. I resisted the fact that I was still resisting reality. The second layer is exhausting.
It’s one thing to be disappointed by the rain on vacation. It’s another thing to judge yourself for being disappointed by the rain during your vacation.
It’s one thing to feel irritated when plans change. It’s another thing to decide that irritation means you’re not as peaceful, evolved, or grounded as you thought you were.
I think many of us get stuck here.
We don’t just feel what we feel. We appreciate it. Let’s classify. We compare it to who we think it should be now.
And sometimes awareness, if we’re not careful, becomes another way of doing that. Instead of giving us more room to be human, it becomes another standard we can’t live up to.
Meditation is where I notice this most clearly.
I sit down, close my eyes, and immediately begin to get the “right” experience. I want my breath to be deep. I want my mind to be quiet. I want my body to soften. I want to feel calm, open, grateful, wise.
But usually the body tells the truth before the mind is ready to admit it. My jaw is tight. My chest is guarded. My thoughts are loud. My breath is shallow.
Then I’ll try to fix that too. I try to breathe better. Get more rest. Accept it better.
Which of course is just another form of control.
The harder I try to make the breath feel natural, the more unnatural it becomes.
But every now and then I stop intervening for a moment. Not because I made something up. Not because I have reached some higher state. I’m just tired of controlling myself.
And in that small place, the body remembers. The breath moves by itself.
Not perfectly. Not mentally. Just honestly.
Maybe life is similar.
Perhaps peace is not the absence of chaos. Perhaps peace will learn to relax the constant negotiation with reality, while accepting that sometimes I still resist it because I am human.
So this morning, as the rain poured over the campsite and the forecast changed again, I found myself saying,
“So what?”
Not with bitterness. Not with apathy. Almost relieved.
Because maybe this is the adventure. Not the polished version. Not the curated version built from perfect weather, perfect mood, and perfect beliefs. The uncertainty. The changing sky. Storms rage unexpectedly. The mystery is that we don’t quite know what the day will be.
Later, after the rain subsided, my wife and I went outside.
The chairs were still wet. The air felt cooler. The lake looked different than before. Not better. Not worse. It just changed.
Nothing during the day lived up to the picture I had in mind. But we were still there. Together. Coffee in hand. Watching water.
And I realized how many mundane moments I missed because I was busy comparing them to what I imagined and then resisting my own resistance.
Maybe this is what I’ve been looking for all along. Not a mind that has stopped feeling. Not a mind that has stopped reacting. Not a mind that has finally figured out how to stay calm about everything.
Just enough freedom to not demand every moment to be something else before I allow myself to live it.
I don’t mean enlightened. I mean, I stopped trying so hard to be someone who would never get caught.
I stopped turning every unpleasant feeling into a self-improvement project. I didn’t need that moment to become something else before I agreed to live it.
I let the day be a day. I’ll let the weather be the weather. I allow myself to be the kind of person who sometimes still longs for sunshine when it’s raining.
And I stopped treating this desire as evidence that I was doing something wrong.
Later, the sky finally cleared.
A breeze was blowing. It was hot again. I had in mind almost exactly the weather I needed to enjoy the day.
Which seemed funny.
Not because it made some great spiritual point, but because life keeps changing before I can definitively decide what it means.
Maybe it’s the practice.
To not stop caring. To not stop hoping. Don’t stop being disappointed when things change.
But not every change is a personal betrayal. So that I no longer need reality to fit the script before I leave myself here.
Because this is my life all the time. Not the polished version. Not the version in my head. It is: rainy, windy, clearing, variable, uncontrolled and alive.
About Brian Reich
Brian Reich writes about mindfulness, self-esteem, and living with a less scripted mind in Unscripted Mind, Just Breathe, and The Pause Room. His works explore the everyday moments where awareness, resistance, humor and humanity meet. Find your free writing and resources here just-breathe.ghost.io.
