I recently started kung fu, which has naturally resulted in me imagining myself somewhere in the mountains of China, practising at sunrise before sitting down in an ancient temple in complete silence.
Very realistic plans.
I blame Kung Fu Panda.
I've always loved those movies. Po being completely ridiculous is obviously part of the appeal, but there's also something about that whole world that pulls me in. The mountains, the temples, the philosophy, the stillness — and this recurring idea of finding inner peace.
It's one of those phrases we've heard so many times that it can start to sound almost meaningless.
Find your inner peace.
Okay. Where exactly did I leave it?
Most of us aren't going to disappear into a mountain temple for six months and return completely enlightened. We have work, bills, phones, other people, bad moods and days when everything feels heavier than it should. We also have an internet that discovers approximately three revolutionary new ways to improve our lives before breakfast.
So I've been thinking about what inner peace actually looks like when you're just a normal person living a normal, occasionally messy life.
And I think I'm beginning to understand it differently.
Inner peace doesn't mean nothing bothers you anymore
I used to think of inner peace as some permanent state of calm. You would eventually become so emotionally evolved that nothing could really disturb you anymore. Someone annoys you, something goes wrong or your carefully made plans completely fall apart, and you simply smile mysteriously into the distance like an ancient kung fu master.
Unfortunately, I remain a human being.
Maybe that's exactly why the idea needs a different definition.
Being at peace doesn't mean you stop having difficult emotions or never question yourself again. It doesn't protect you from disappointment, frustration or uncertainty, and it certainly doesn't make every morning feel meaningful.
There will still be bad days. Sometimes you'll make the wrong decision. Sometimes you'll have absolutely no idea what you're doing.
I don't think any of that means you've somehow failed at being peaceful. Maybe peace isn't the absence of those experiences at all. Maybe it's knowing that you have somewhere inside yourself to return to when they happen.
I noticed something had changed in me
I can't point to the moment it happened because there wasn't some dramatic realization. I just gradually noticed that things that used to pull my attention in every possible direction didn't seem to have the same power over me anymore.
I genuinely don't care that much about the latest trend. I can see someone who appears to be five years ahead of me without immediately deciding that I need to catch up. A new AI tool can arrive tomorrow promising to completely transform the way we work, think, sleep, eat breakfast and probably communicate with dolphins, and somehow I will survive.
It's not that I've stopped being curious or caring about the world around me. I still want to learn things. I still change my mind. I still find new ideas exciting.
The difference is that I can notice something without immediately allowing it to change my direction.
That sounds like a small thing, but I don't think it is.
A year ago, I'm not sure I trusted myself enough to do that.
The world can be loud without becoming your compass
There will always be someone who knows what you should be doing with your life.
Apparently they also know what you should want, where you should live, how quickly you should be progressing, which habits you need and what success is supposed to look like.
The strange thing about living online is that we don't even have to actively search for these opinions anymore. We carry them around in our pockets.
You don't necessarily have to believe what you're seeing for it to start affecting you. If you see the same kind of life often enough, eventually you might wonder why yours doesn't look like that. If you hear the same advice often enough, it can become surprisingly difficult to remember what you thought before everybody started explaining things to you.
I’ve written about this before in The More Advice I Consumed, the Less I Trusted Myself, because sometimes consuming more answers only makes it harder to hear your own.
I've experienced that myself.
For a long time, I thought the solution was somehow becoming better at filtering all of it. Now I think there's another option: I don't need to argue with every outside voice or prove that it's wrong. I simply don't have to follow it.
The world is allowed to be loud. It just doesn't get to be my compass.
That, to me, feels much closer to peace.
Being present makes your own life easier to hear
It's strange how much of our lives we spend somewhere other than where we actually are.
We replay things that happened years ago, try to predict things that haven't happened yet and watch what everyone else is doing right now. We think about where we should be by this age or how different everything might be once we've finally reached the next thing.
Meanwhile, an actual life is happening.
I’ve explored this from another angle in You Don’t Have to Live at the Internet’s Pace — because sometimes slowing down has less to do with doing less and more to do with deciding whose pace you’re actually following.
The more I've learned to come back to the life in front of me, the easier it has become to notice ordinary information about myself. I can tell what I'm genuinely curious about, what drains me, what I keep returning to and what I enjoy even when nobody else knows I'm doing it.
Those things don't necessarily arrive as some dramatic revelation about your life's purpose. Most of the time they're much quieter than that.
Maybe that's why they're so easy to miss when your attention is constantly somewhere else.
You might not need another person to tell you what you want from your life. You might simply need enough quiet to notice what has already been trying to get your attention.
Maybe the higher self isn't as mysterious as it sounds
This is where I'm going to get slightly spiritual.
Don't worry. I'm not about to sell you a portal to another dimension.
I've always found the idea of a higher self interesting, although I don't think it has to mean the same thing to everyone. For some people it's deeply spiritual. For others, the whole idea probably sounds a little strange.
I like thinking about it in a much simpler way.
Maybe your higher self is not some flawless, enlightened version of you floating somewhere above the clouds. Maybe it's simply the version of you that's easier to hear when comparison, expectations and everybody else's opinions aren't taking up quite so much space.
It's the part of you that can recognise when something feels meaningful, when something isn't for you or when you don't know exactly where a path leads but still feel curious enough to keep walking.
Maybe spirituality doesn't always have to involve searching for something outside ourselves. Sometimes it might simply mean becoming quiet enough to trust what is already there.
I think self-trust has a lot to do with it
The more I've thought about inner peace, the more I've started connecting it with self-trust.
Constantly questioning your own judgement is exhausting. You make a decision and then look around to see whether everybody else agrees. You choose a direction and immediately find someone online explaining why another direction would be better. You feel good about something until you compare it with somebody else's version and suddenly your own doesn't seem quite enough.
It's difficult to feel peaceful when your own judgement is permanently on trial.
Things started changing for me when my own opinion began carrying more weight. Not because I suddenly believed I was always right — that would create an entirely different set of problems — but because I realised I don't actually need to be right every time in order to trust myself.
Sometimes I will make a decision that doesn't work. I'll learn something from it, adjust and continue.
That's not failure. That's how being a person works.
You don't need enough wisdom to avoid every wrong turn. You need enough trust in yourself to know that you'll be able to find your way again.
There isn't one correct path
This might be the part of all of this that matters most to me.
We aren't all trying to build the same life, yet somehow we keep measuring ourselves using the same map.
Someone else's path may be faster, more profitable, more impressive or easier for the people around them to understand. That doesn't automatically mean it's the direction you're supposed to take.
Your own path might be slower. Maybe you'll change direction halfway through. Maybe something you desperately wanted three years ago won't matter to you anymore. Maybe you'll spend some time wandering around without being completely sure where you're going.
I don't think that's something we need to eliminate from life.
We're supposed to learn. We're supposed to change. We're allowed to become people our past selves couldn't have predicted.
I don't think the point is to discover the universally correct way to live. Maybe part of the point is discovering what feels meaningful to you and developing enough trust in yourself to keep choosing it, even when there is an easier, faster or more socially approved road available.
Sometimes peace looks like leaving yourself alone
I've been tired lately. Nothing dramatic has happened; I've just felt more tired than usual.
For a while, I couldn't think of anything I genuinely wanted to say in my emails, so I didn't send one.
There was definitely a version of me who would have turned that into a problem. I should be consistent. I should come up with something. I haven't written enough. I need to keep producing.
This time I just let myself be quiet.
And, rather inconveniently for the productivity advice industry, nothing terrible happened.
Eventually the thoughts started coming back on their own. This blog is one of them.
Apparently my brain hadn't permanently run out of ideas. It just wanted me to leave it alone for a while.
I've been thinking about that too.
We are so quick to assume that every quiet period needs fixing. If we're not progressing, creating, deciding or figuring something out, we start wondering what's wrong.
But sometimes trusting yourself means moving forward, and sometimes it means knowing when not to force movement at all.
I don't think you find inner peace once
I'd love to tell you that I've now figured this out and will spend the rest of my life floating gracefully through every inconvenience.
I have not.
I'll get distracted again. I'll compare myself to someone. I'll worry about the future, make a questionable decision or temporarily forget everything I just wrote in this article.
But maybe inner peace was never supposed to be something you achieve once and then permanently possess.
Perhaps it's something you return to.
Sometimes a walk brings you back. Sometimes it's a conversation, a page in a journal or five minutes where nobody needs anything from you. Maybe for me it will occasionally be kung fu.
And if five quiet minutes are all you have today, I wrote a simple five-minute pause for when life feels heavy for exactly those kinds of moments.
Each time you come back, you know the way a little better.
I like that idea much more than trying to become permanently peaceful.
Remember which path you're walking
Maybe inner peace isn't about making the world quiet.
It's knowing yourself well enough that you can still hear your own voice while the world continues being exactly as noisy, unpredictable and opinionated as it has always been.
It's accepting that other people can choose differently without their choices becoming evidence that yours are wrong. It's understanding that you'll make mistakes without treating every mistake as proof that you can't trust yourself. And it's learning to be present for the life you're actually living instead of constantly measuring it against the one you could have lived, should be living or might live someday.
Most of all, I think it's remembering which path you're walking even when everyone around you seems to be pointing somewhere else.
Maybe that's inner peace.
Or at least part of it.
I still wouldn't say no to the mountain temple, though.
