Power or Peace?

Today would have been my Nana’s 97th birthday.

She’s been gone since 2022, and there are days when that still feels unreal. Not because she was loud or flashy or demanded space. The opposite. She mattered because she was steady. Because her presence softened rooms. Because being near her made you feel less rushed and somehow more whole.

Lately, a question keeps showing up in my therapy room. It’s rarely asked directly, but it’s always there underneath the words.

Does peace come through power and control, like the world keeps promising? Or does it come through patience and humility, like most spiritual traditions have whispered for centuries?

The culture is loud about its answer. Be stronger. Be faster. Be right. Be in charge. Control the narrative, the outcome, the future. Don’t let anyone get one over on you. Don’t show weakness. Don’t slow down.

Power looks like certainty. Control looks like safety. At least that’s the pitch.

But the people I sit with every week know something isn’t adding up. They did everything they were told to do. They gripped tighter. They tried harder. They stayed vigilant. And instead of peace, they found themselves exhausted, anxious, brittle. Always guarding. Always bracing.

My Nana never talked about power. I don’t remember her trying to win arguments or dominate rooms. She didn’t need to be the loudest voice or the smartest person at the table. She listened. She waited. She let people be who they were, without trying to fix or manage them.

And somehow, she carried more authority than most people who chase it.

She understood something our nervous systems remember even when our minds forget. Peace does not come from forcing the world into compliance. It comes from learning how to stay grounded when the world does not cooperate.

Patience is not passivity. Humility is not weakness. They are forms of strength that do not need to announce themselves.

In sessions, I watch people begin to experiment with this. They stop trying to control their partner’s reactions and start tending to their own. They release the fantasy that certainty will save them and begin practicing tolerance for the unknown. They let go of being right and choose to be present.

And slowly, something shifts.

Their bodies soften. Their breath deepens. Their relationships feel less like battlefields and more like shared ground.

This is the kind of peace my Nana lived. Not the peace of everything going her way, but the peace of being anchored. The peace of knowing who you are even when life is hard. The peace that comes from humility, from patience, from trusting that you do not have to dominate the moment to survive it.

The world will keep telling us that peace is something you seize. That safety comes from control. That power is the answer.

But every truly peaceful person I have known has taught me the same quiet lesson.

Peace is something you practice. Something you embody. Something you become.

Happy birthday, Nana. Thank you for showing me a better way.