Finding Peace in the Present Moment
Most resistance doesn’t come from fear of failure.
It comes from fear of losing control.
We resist the flow not because it’s wrong, but because it asks us to release familiar structures. Roles. Narratives. Identities we’ve already paid for with time and effort. Flow threatens certainty, and certainty feels safer than alignment, even when it costs us.
This essay explores why we push against what is already moving us forward. Why we tighten our grip when momentum is present. And how resistance often masquerades as discipline, logic, or self-protection, when in reality it is a refusal to trust what we cannot fully predict.
Understanding resistance is not about surrendering responsibility. It’s about recognizing when effort becomes friction, when control becomes constraint, and when the very force we’re fighting is the one designed to carry us forward.
It was early afternoon when I stepped outside with the princess. The air was crisp when it hit me. It was the kind of feeling that reminds you autumn is here to stay. It was fifty-five degrees, under an aquamarine sky scattered with a few cottony clouds hanging low over the village. The lake shimmered brightly in the sunlight’s glow, which felt like a warm kiss against my skin.
I’d planned to walk at least a mile before my meeting. The princess trotted beside me, her tiny paws pattering against the pavement. We had walked for a bit when she began tugging, not forward, as usual, but back.
“Come on, girl,” I said softly, coaxing her on the path out of the woods. “Let’s keep going.”
She stopped. Tugged harder toward home. I sighed, thinking she must be tired. But something in me, a quiet voice, not loud, not commanding, just sure, said, “Don’t fight it”.
But it was strange because she always wanted to go farther. Yet that day, she didn’t. So against my instinct to push, to lead, to finish the goal I’d set in my head, I decided to let her guide me. I turned back, feeling slightly defeated yet oddly calm.
As a result, we reached the house sooner than planned. I cleaned her up, gave her a treat, and she settled in her bed with a satisfied sigh. I head upstairs to freshen up for my meeting. As I looked at the time, my heart stilled. I had just enough minutes to prepare! Any longer and I would have been late. Had I forced the walk, I would have missed it. How did I overlook that?
It was in that moment that I had a revelation, a small lesson arriving in the silence between seconds:
Sometimes the things that slow you down are the same things that keep you in rhythm.
Later, as I thought about it, I asked myself:
Why do we resist the flow? Why do we fight what’s gently guiding us home?
We spend so much of our lives trying to push or force, or as I emphatically like to call it, “lead the leash,” instead of trusting where the current is taking us. We think detours are delays, when in truth, they’re grace in disguise.
That quiet tug on the leash made me think of another moment in someone else’s story, one that taught me about divine delay.
The Story of Natalie
There was a woman named Natalie who worked in design. She lived for color, for the moment an idea bloomed from sketch to shape, from concept to creation. Natalie was passionate about her work and utterly consumed by it. Her desk was always covered with Pantone swatches, paper mockups, and half-finished prototypes. For her, design wasn’t just about aesthetics; it was about emotion and how people felt when they encountered what she’d made.
When a Creative Director position opened at her firm, she felt something stir deep inside her. This is it, she thought. This is my moment. She’d been preparing for years. Leading projects with quiet authority, mentoring junior designers, and taking on extra hours. Everyone knew she was capable; quietly brilliant, the kind of steady light that held the team together.
Natalie submitted her portfolio, rehearsed her presentation, and stayed late perfecting her pitch deck. She prayed, visualized, believed. And, she even bought a new blazer in deep navy, her favorite color.
A few weeks later, the email came. Thank you for applying… We’ve decided to move forward with another candidate.
Natalie stared at the words, feeling that familiar drop in her chest, the hollow ache of rejection.
Still, she composed herself. She congratulated the person who got the role, even offering to help transition some of her projects. It was the kind of grace she didn’t entirely feel, but gave anyway.
The Shift
Over time, she noticed things shifting. The person who’d been hired struggled in the role. Meetings turned tense. The once vibrant studio began to dim. Deadlines and responsibilities on the teams multiplied, and laughter disappeared from the halls. The new Creative Director, though talented, was constantly undermined by senior management. Chaos ensued with faces masked behind phony smiles.
Natalie remained steady. She kept creating, kept her heart soft. Months later, as the storm worsened, she received an unexpected message from a former client, a boutique design house expanding their team. They’d remembered her work from years before.
“Would you be open to talking about a Senior Design Strategist position?” She smiled. “Absolutely.”
The interview felt effortless. The energy was right. Within two weeks, she had an offer, higher pay, creative freedom, and an organization that valued balance as much as brilliance. She took it.
And not long after, her old firm began to crumble. The leadership that had once looked so stable imploded. People she loved left in waves.
One afternoon, sitting in her new office bathed in sunlight, Natalie thought of that rejection email. It now felt less like a loss and more like an answered prayer.
The no she received had been a quiet rescue. The delay, a hidden door. “The yes she had wanted would have clipped her wings. The no she received had set her free.”
The Reflection
When I think of Natalie, I think of how often life speaks before we listen. How often it whispers: Not yet. This way. Wait.
And yet we push. We strategize, insist, and tighten the leash when life tugs another way. But what if the current is never wrong? What if the delay is not punishment but protection, not stagnation but synchronization?
The princess taught me something that day. So did Natalie. Both moments, one quiet, one monumental, shared the same truth: there’s an invisible intelligence to timing.
We don’t always have to see the reason; we just have to trust the rhythm.
When we force things, we disrupt that rhythm. We create resistance where there was only ease. But when we flow, when we soften our grip, life rearranges itself in ways we could never design.
Sometimes the wind changes direction because the Spirit is realigning your sails. Sometimes the silence is not absence, but calibration.
Seasons of Trust
It’s easy to have faith when doors swing open. The challenge is when they don’t, when everything in you screams, “I’m ready now,” and life gently replies, “Not quite yet.”
Those are the sacred pauses. The in-betweens where growth hides.
There’s a rhythm to everything, seasons that can’t be rushed. Flowers don’t bloom faster because we stare at them. Rivers don’t hurry to the sea because we demand it. They move as they must. Freely, assuredly, beautifully.
And yet, we humans, we who are part of the same nature, fight that rhythm constantly. We doubt, we push, we pull. We call it ambition, but often it’s fear wearing last season’s Blahniks.
When I look back on every moment that didn’t go my way, the missed opportunities, the delays, the plans that unraveled, I can now see a clear thread.
Each “no” was carrying me toward a “yes” that fit. Each detour, divine. I didn’t miss my destiny; I didn’t recognize the route.
The walk with the princess, that small act of surrender, was a rehearsal for a greater truth. To live in flow is to live without fear of timing.
Flow is not passivity, it’s alignment. It’s the quiet confidence that says, if it’s meant for me, I won’t have to chase it; I’ll meet it when the current brings it to shore.
The Closing
I took Hailey out for another walk that evening. By that time, the air had gotten even chillier. The sun had slipped behind the trees, painting the clouds in lavender and rose. The princess looked up at me, leash slack, tail swaying, her eyes reflecting her sweetness and innocence, as if to say: now, let’s go.
I smiled. We stood there for a moment, breathing in the twilight. The world felt still, not silent, but serene. The kind of stillness that hums with knowing.
And I realized, maybe the flow of life isn’t something we step into once; maybe it’s something we return to, again and again, whenever we stop trying to be in control and trust that good is already working in our favor.
The wind shifted, gentle, calm, and cool against my face. I watched a leaf fall into the lake and drift toward the center, carried exactly where it was meant to go.
I whispered to myself, “The current knows the way. I just have to trust it.”
And in that moment, I did.
What would happen if we remembered to trust the flow more? If we let life be the designer, and us the brushstroke?