The path wound through the woods like a ribbon forgotten by the sun.
The man walked it alone.
He had walked it before, in the spring when the leaves were young and green, in the summer when the air was thick and alive, and now, in the calm chill of November. The light fell differently each time, but it was always the same path.
He thought of peace as he walked. Not the kind you read about or pray for. The kind that comes for a few minutes in the quiet, when the only sound is the wind brushing through branches and the earth beneath your step. He wondered if that was all peace ever was, a brief stillness between storms. Maybe that is why men chase it like the holy grail. The path reminded him of his father.
The old man used to walk these woods too, not for exercise or sport, but because it was the one place he could breathe. When the son was a boy, he didn’t understand that kind of silence. Now, years later, with the old man gone and his mother’s voice only an echo in memory, he finally understood. Their deaths hadn’t brought him peace, only a different kind of noise. Grief has its own hum.
He thought of his children next.
Each one different, each one still figuring out what their own peace looked like. He had tried to teach them what his father never said aloud that life isn’t about winning, it’s about walking. You raise them, you steady their wings, and one day they go. They turn back for a moment and smile before the trees swallow them up. You want to follow, but you know it isn't your journey. The path can't run backward.
The sun shifted.
It had started on his left when he began the walk, but now the angle had changed. It broke through the trees in slivers, lighting the path ahead in pieces. That is how peace worked, he thought, it didn’t come all at once. It came in shards and fragments, through breaks in the branches, through the little mercies of time.
He thought about his work, the decades of it.
The winning years and the bad ones. The nights staring at the ceiling wondering if any of it meant something. Success had never felt like peace. It was motion. The same restless motion that carried him through the years, from one decade to another, one chapter to the next. You can make money in this life, he thought, but you can’t buy stillness.
The woods have grown darker now.
The light had turned amber, thin and tired. He reached a bend in the trail where the trees opened wide enough to see the western sky. It was a dull orange, streaked with gray. The day was closing, and he could feel it in his bones. The kind of ache that wasn’t pain but reminder. He stood there for a long time, just listening.
Maybe peace wasn’t something you found.
Maybe it was something you built...
... in the way you forgave your parents, in the way you let your children go, in the way you walked through your own doubts and never stopped moving.
The wind shifted again.
He started back toward home.
Behind him, the sun was almost gone, and ahead, the shadows were long and reaching. He thought about the quote he’d written on the chalkboard that morning: Maybe the peace we all seek is but a dream.
He smiled a little.
Maybe peace can never be found, but the dream was worth the walk.
