Living from the Inside Out

Lizzie Mae Smith's latest column

My reflections this season have come from hearing that many people are waking up already braced. Heart a little tight, thoughts racing ahead, it is as if their body is expecting something to go wrong before the day has even begun. The world feels heavy, headlines are loud, and the pace of life feels impossible to keep up with.

As caregivers, that tension feels doubly charged. The children in our families and communities look to us for steadiness, for unspoken reassurance that they are safe. I’ve come to learn that true safety, the kind that calms the nervous system and restores peace, doesn’t begin outside us. It begins within.

It is not unusual to believe that safety comes from control: having a plan, staying alert, preparing for what might happen next. But control is exhausting, and it doesn’t deliver what it promises. Personally, over a long time, I came to sense that the safety I chased wasn’t something I could secure, but something I could remember.

Now when fear rises, I pause. I breathe. Then I ask myself quietly, ‘What if I could see this differently?’ That single question softens life’s edges. It invites me to step back from panic and remember that peace isn’t something I earn, it’s something that’s already here, underneath the noise.