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When Peace Is Not in the Past
On Healing Through the Future
We often think of peace as something we must recover, as though it is an artefact buried in the past, waiting to be excavated before things went wrong.
When we experience loss, trauma, or disruption, the instinct is to return: to retrace the path back to before the betrayal, before the illness, before the heartbreak.
The logic is simple: if the pain began at some point, peace could be found by reversing course.
What if peace isn’t something we return to but something we must build ahead of us?
What if peace is not a restoration of the past but a construction of the future?
Peace is less about returning to what was and more about becoming someone who can hold what happened without being held by it.
The desire to return to innocence or harmony is deeply human. In Plato’s philosophy, the soul’s longing for truth is homesickness for the ideal realm of forms, a perfect, immutable past.
In religious narratives, this theme is seen in Eden, the primordial place of peace lost to sin.
Even modern psychology echoes this yearning: inner child work, attachment repair, and nostalgia all assume that something good was lost and must be retrieved.
