Your Path to Peace

For a long time, I thought peace was something you arrived at — a destination, a finish line, a feeling you'd eventually earn if you did enough right. It took me years to understand that peace doesn't work that way. The real path to peace isn't forward. It's backward, first.
It means healing the past.
For me, that meant sitting with the uncomfortable wounds I picked up as a child — the disappointments, the quiet belief that I wasn't worthy or wasn't enough. Those wounds don't transform overnight. They take years to even name, let alone release. My peace was built on that slow, unglamorous work: turning back toward the child I used to be, and finally giving her what she needed.
Two songs carried me through that trail as a young woman — the Beatles' The Long and Winding Road and John Lennon's Imagine. I listened to them over and over, not fully understanding why they moved me so deeply at the time. Looking back, I think they were naming something I couldn't yet say myself: that the road home to yourself is rarely straight, and that peace — real peace — has to be imagined into being before it can ever be lived.
Those songs crept into the cracks and crevices of who I was becoming. They became part of the foundation for what I believe, and for the work of my charity today.
Your path to peace will look different from mine. But I believe it starts in the same place: not by running from the past, but by finally turning around to face it.