The Calm of the Tide - Finding Inner Peace

"Silence is sometimes the best answer." — Dalai Lama

The café was alive with movement — cups clinking, spoons stirring, sunlight brushing against polished tables. Across from me sat a Turkish woman, stylish and composed, her daughter at her side. She carried herself with an elegance that wasn’t loud but assured, the kind that comes from knowing what keeps you steady.

Her eyes brightened when she spoke of the sea. “When I feel stress, I walk. Always to the water. The sea gives me peace.” The way she said it, I could almost see her there, framed by an endless horizon, letting the waves quiet her inner tides.

I noticed how she leaned back slightly as she spoke of conflict — not with tension, but with the ease of someone who has already chosen her path. “I don’t continue arguments,” she said simply. “I walk away.” A hand lifted, then dropped, as if letting a stone slip back into the water.

Prayer, too, was part of her landscape. Not ritualistic, but intimate — a conversation with God, soft-spoken and personal, like a grounding rhythm she could return to.

And then there was kindness. She told me that when stress weighs heavy, helping a stranger lightens it. The story she recalled was not dramatic — a homeless man near her building, his dogs shivering in the winter cold. She had brought food, bedding, a little money. “It made me feel peace,” she said, and I could sense it was true.

Her daughter, beside her, offered a contrast. For her, coping meant retreat: sleep, quiet, a private kind of rest. Mother and daughter — two ways of carrying the weight of life, one outward and giving, the other inward and conserving — yet both deeply human.

She is fifty-three, though numbers seem irrelevant when sitting with someone whose presence feels timeless. What struck me most was the ease with which she embodies her philosophy: walking away instead of fuelling fire, seeking the vastness of the sea, finding calm in acts of kindness.

As I left, I carried her serenity with me. It lingered like the stillness after the tide pulls back — a reminder that peace is often found not in holding on, but in knowing when to release.

Finding inner peace

Finding Inner Peace...