You are allowed to choose peace.

Not because uncertainty has vanished,
nor because sorrow has released every question,
but because the heart was never meant
to live forever at odds with itself.

You are allowed to believe in gentleness,
to welcome what does not wound in order to deepen,
what does not require unrest
to prove its meaning,
what arrives softly
and still possesses weight.

You are allowed to loosen
your allegiance to struggle,
to receive what is tender
without doubting its worth,
to believe that what comes without force
may still change the shape of a life.

Peace need not wait
beyond the farthest reach of difficulty.
Mercy may come without announcement.
What is gentle may endure.
What asks less of your fear
may simply ask that you remain open.

Perhaps peace is not a destination,
but a way of relinquishing
what cannot be mastered,
of releasing the need to foresee,
of allowing what is unfinished
to remain, for a while, unfinished.

Perhaps it is the inward permission
to believe that uncertainty
does not mean you have been forsaken,
that what has not yet revealed itself
may still be held within a wisdom
larger than your own.

You may choose what steadies the spirit,
what leaves room for wonder,
what allows the heart to remain open
without requiring certainty in return.

And when doubt returns,
you need not surrender yourself to it.
You may rest in what has remained faithful,
in the knowledge that not everything
must be understood before it can be entrusted.

You are allowed to choose peace.

Not as retreat,
nor resignation,
nor the narrowing of a life,
but as the release
of what was never yours to govern.

As the willingness to believe
that purpose may exist beyond understanding,
that joy may arrive before explanation,
that what is meant to sustain you
need not first ask you to suffer.

And perhaps, in the end,
peace is simply this:

to loosen your hold
on what has not yet revealed itself,

to believe that what lies beyond your keeping
is not therefore beyond care,

to let the heart rest
without asking every unanswered thing
to disclose its ending,

and when tomorrow gathers
at the edge of thought,

to remember that you were never asked
to carry it before it comes.

You are allowed to choose peace.

To release what you cannot yet know,
and to rest in the tender certainty
that what you cannot carry
was never meant to be carried
by you alone.