Holding a Hand Grenade

meditation on love, absence, and chaos inside

I used to think peace meant nothing happening. I thought if I could get everything to calm down, I’d finally have control. That meant no conflict, no noise, no unexpected messages from people who still make my stomach drop. I built my version of peace by keeping life small enough to manage. It worked for a while. But eventually, I started realizing I was not peaceful. I was just waiting.

There’s a difference between stillness and avoidance, and I think I confused them for most of my twenties. Avoidance looks calm on the surface, but underneath it’s all tension. It’s like holding your breath and calling it meditation. Stillness is something different. Stillness is the kind of quiet that comes after you’ve already faced the chaos, not before it.

I used to think Stoicism was about shutting things out. I liked the idea of being unaffected, of keeping a clean line between myself and whatever was trying to pull me off center. But lately, I’m starting to think that’s just fear with a philosophical filter on it. The people who talk most about detachment are usually the ones who have been hurt and are trying to turn that hurt into a worldview. I say that from experience.

Romance makes this lesson impossible to ignore. It’s chaos disguised as connection. One moment you feel invincible, like you’ve finally found something steady to hold onto. The next, you’re watching it all slip through your fingers. Love has a way of pulling everything loose; your sleep, your patience, your sense of control. You can tell yourself you’re grounded, but one look, one silence, one memory can undo months of composure.

I remember one night, about three years ago, sitting on a street bench outside their home after we said goodbye for the last time. It wasn’t dramatic. No shouting, no tears, just a quiet that felt too final. I watched her lights go out through the fog as I sat on my lonesome throne, the cold steel of the Capitol bench pressing through my worn blue jeans, and thought about how strange it is that something can end without anyone doing anything wrong. I sat long enough for the reflection of my face on the unlit screen of the iPhone I was clutching like a hand grenade to start looking like a stranger’s. That was the first time I understood what people mean when they say you can feel both full and empty at the same time.

There’s a kind of madness that comes with missing someone. The mind keeps replaying old scenes like it’s trying to rewrite them. You find yourself checking your phone without meaning to, or thinking about what you should have said differently, as if words could change what people choose to forget. It’s strange how absence can fill a room so completely. You try to reason with it, but longing doesn’t care about reason. It just wants to be felt.

The truth is that control is an illusion. You can read every book, set every boundary, speak with total honesty, and things can still fall apart. Someone can still change their mind. You can still end up staring at the ceiling at three in the morning wondering what went wrong. Stoicism doesn’t erase that reality. It just gives you a way to meet it without falling apart.

When I think about what it means to grow, I no longer think of progress as becoming unshakable. I think of it as becoming more honest. Honest about what hurts, about what scares me, about the part of me that still wants to be chosen. Growth is not clean or linear. It’s messy, repetitive, and sometimes humiliating. But it’s also what keeps you human.

There are moments when the storm inside you builds so quietly that you don’t even notice until it’s already there. You feel the pressure behind your ribs, the pulse in your jaw, the need to say something you probably shouldn’t. The instinct is to run from it. But lately I’ve been trying to stay. To sit with the discomfort long enough to see what it’s made of. Usually it’s fear. Sometimes it’s longing. Sometimes it’s both.

Stillness doesn’t mean silence. It means facing the noise until you can hear yourself again. It means letting the storm pass through without pretending it doesn’t exist. It means forgiving yourself for feeling too much and still choosing to try again tomorrow.

Maybe peace isn’t about getting the world to calm down. Maybe it’s about learning to be steady while it moves. The storm doesn’t have to destroy you. Sometimes it’s just there to remind you that you are still alive, still changing, still capable of love that hurts and heals in the same breath.

That’s the kind of peace I want now. Not the fragile kind that depends on everything going right, but the grounded kind that survives when nothing does.

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Epilogue

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that most storms don’t ask for solutions. They ask for attention. The mind wants to fix everything fast, but the heart only wants to be witnessed. When things start to shake, try to meet the moment instead of mastering it. Sit in the uncertainty for a little while and see what it’s showing you.

Missing someone can feel like failure, but maybe it’s proof that you once lived honestly. It means you cared enough to be changed by another person. You don’t have to erase the chaos to move forward, but if you do decide to carry it, you just have to carry it more gently.

If peace isn’t the absence of chaos, what if it’s the willingness to still stay open?

-W.B. Huxley