The Strength to Stay Soft

 

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I was reheating leftovers when I remembered it.

Standing in the kitchen, waiting for the microwave to beep, I glanced over at our current living room setup. The TV sits recessed slightly into a custom bookcase our neighbor built for us. My two youngest boys were sprawled out on the couches with phones in their hands. Everything was calm and ordinary.

And suddenly, I was back there.

Back in the basement, years earlier. A brand-new plasma TV, hanging on a wall that had sat bare for the better part of a decade, finally adorned with something. It was the kind of purchase we had planned for, saved for, and installed carefully. The kind of thing you don’t replace on a whim.

And then — the sound.

Small feet scrambling up the stairs.

Followed by a sentence that still makes me smile: “Dad, we think you’re going to want to come downstairs.”

I don’t remember how old my daughter was — maybe seven or eight.

The kids and their friends had been playing in the basement. Tossing toys around. Doing what kids do.

My youngest daughter threw a heavy, baseball-sized toy in the direction of the TV. I never even asked her if it was aimed or accidental, because it didn’t matter. Still doesn’t. The result was the same.

The glass shattered, and the screen died.

The TV we had used only a dozen times was destroyed.

I’m pretty sure my older kids were convinced we’d be holding a funeral for their sister right alongside the TV.

And honestly, in another season of life, they might have been metaphorically right.

I’ve raised my voice over things that didn’t matter nearly as much.
I’ve snapped over socks on the stairs. Dishes in the sink.
I’ve reacted when I should’ve responded.

But that day was different.

I walked downstairs calmly.
I saw her face before I saw the TV.
And I knew in an instant — nothing I could say or do would make her feel worse than she already did.

She already knew.
She knew she couldn’t fix it.
She knew we couldn’t afford another one.
She knew something she hadn’t meant to break had real consequences.

And in that moment, thankfully, everything in me softened.

I dropped to my knees and hugged her.
I told her it was just a thing.
That things can be replaced.
That the only thing that mattered was that she was okay.

Then I pulled the TV off the wall, carried it out to the garage, and didn’t say another word about it.

It’s easy to think strength means powering up. Holding your ground. Making your point. Showing you’re in control.

That kind of strength is loud, sharp, and often unkind.
It looks decisive from the outside. In the Western world, it‘s even glamorized; made to seem admirable.

But it doesn’t always leave room to pause. For grace and for softness.

I’m finally starting to believe that’s the kind of strength that matters more. A lot more.

There was a story my brain wanted to tell that day. One about responsibility and cost. One that wanted someone to feel the weight of their mistake. One that believed “teaching a lesson” meant someone had to cry.

(She was already crying.)

But I’m so grateful another, quieter voice showed up instead.

The one that said: She’s already learned the lesson. Just love her. She’s watching you.

And she was. Along with my two older kids and their friends.

It’s taken me a long time to unlearn the idea that softness equals weakness.
That calm is the same as passive.
That gentleness means surrendering authority.

It’s not true.

Softness is a choice.
It’s a kind of strength that doesn’t need to prove anything.
It doesn’t yell orders or keep score.
It just stays.

Present. Grounded. Willing.

I still think about that broken TV from time to time.
Not because I miss it.
But because that moment reminded me who I want to be.

The version of me that kneels instead of scolds.
Who listens first.
Who chooses connection over correction when it matters most.

That doesn’t always happen.
I still raise my voice when I wish I hadn’t.
I still get sharp when I’m tired or stretched too thin.

But now I recognize the opportunity to stay soft — even when the moment seems to call for something harder.

And that awareness is reshaping me.

Moment by moment.
Hug by hug.
Microwave beep by microwave beep.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of my reflections on identity, meaning, and building a life I don’t want to run away from.

You can check it out here:

Aaron Pace on Books.by

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live? You Don't Have to Escape to Be Free…

books.by

To Mourn or Celebrate What Once Was

 

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I was folding laundry next to my bed when it happened. It was a towel. I don’t know how my youngest daughter uses so many towels. It was pink, yellow, and white. I’ve never quite been able to figure out the design.

The towel’s old. I don’t know where it came from and it’s been around as long as I can remember. It’s worn. One of those towels that’s been washed hundreds of times and still has the shape of a towel but doesn’t absorb as much water as it used to, and the edges were frayed.

I leaned over to toss it on the pile of towels across the bed, and for some reason, I just stopped. I held the towel between my hands, feeling the fabric. My brain, which is always a mile ahead being pulled in different directions, didn’t move. I remembered when my kids were little. Helping them take a bath, then wrapping them in the towel to keep them warm while they dried.

It’s funny how when you stop like that you can almost hear the echoes of the past. Little kids running through the house, their wet footprints following them down the hall.

I blinked a couple of times and refocused my gaze. Just like that, the moment passed, but it left an impression behind.

My aunt and I like to talk about the past. It’s becoming a favorite shared hobby. As we get older, we’re developing a keen sense of the way things used to be. There was a park not far from her childhood home where I also used to play with my siblings. 900 West back then wasn’t four lanes of heavy traffic. It was an infrequently traveled road you could cross without adult supervision or traffic lights. Nobody cared if you and your siblings wandered to the Peace Gardens for a couple hours with no phones and no adults. We were just gone and came back when we were done.

There’s a sweetness to those memories. It’s a bit of nostalgia mixed with something deeper. A reminder that the world once seemed knowable and smaller and safer.

I don’t live far from there. A long Saturday run could take me past that same park. But I wouldn’t let my kids cross 900 West today — not alone. The cars move too fast. The sidewalks are filled with people who look lost, not just in geography, but in life. Addiction has crept into the corners where we used to hide behind bushes, waiting to jump out and scare each other. I used to carry my little sister on my shoulders, certain she was safe as long as I held on tight. Now I have older kids of my own, and I can’t carry them anymore. I just have to hope that what I’ve taught them will be enough — that they’ll stay upright, steady, and safe in a world I can’t control.

It’s not the same.

Funny. That’s what the towel reminded me of.

There’s an undeniable ache that comes from realizing or remembering that something is gone—not just changed, but gone in a way that you can’t get back. We’ve all experienced tragic loss and the feelings that come with it. There are big, dramatic ways that we experience that loss, but it can show up in the most mundane ways.

The phone call I’ll never get again.

The way my mom’s handwriting looked on a note.

The absurd laughter of a friendship that’s gone.

The hum of energy that existed during a season of work, now complete.

Each of these things can pull you backward if you let them. There’s a gravity to what we’ve lost. The story our minds want to tell is sometimes one of scarcity: “You’ll never have that again.” “That was the good part.” “It’s gone now.”

And maybe it is.

But does that mean I have to mourn it forever?

Or is there a way to celebrate it instead?

I think there is. I think we get to choose how we carry the past.

Not in a delusional way where I pretend everything was better than it was. I don’t want to eulogize or sanitize. Some things were painful. Some people hurt me. I hurt some people. Some of life’s seasons have been—and are—exhausting, even when they looked beautiful from the outside.

But there’s something sacred about remembering with gratitude instead of grief.

The world my kids are growing up in seems so different than the world I grew up in. They’ll never experience a ride in the back of a pickup truck with no seatbelt or get kicked out of the house with the instruction to “be home when the streetlights turn on.” That kind of freedom was specific to a certain time and place. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have their own beautiful memories. Their own stories to one day remember.

And it certainly doesn’t mean the past was wasted just because I can’t go back to it.

I’ve started asking myself, when something old and familiar shows up:

Am I supposed to mourn this?

Or celebrate it?

There’s no one right answer, but the asking itself is helpful.

It keeps me from falling into the trap of trying to measure the past against the present, or the present against what might have been. It lets me notice what was without being swallowed by what isn’t.

I can miss the simplicity of walking barefoot across 900 West and still be present enough to walk with my kids to church on Sundays. I can hold both the ache and the gift in the same breath.

The world changes. We change. The towel gets frayed. But it still dries your face. It still works. You can fold it and pause and let it remind you that the good parts weren’t fake — and they’re not lost just because they’re over.

They’re part of the fabric now, woven in.

And that is enough.

When Healing Doesn’t Feel Like Progress

 

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

I was seventeen, running around on a cracked concrete basketball court outside Ashton, Idaho. A large patch of grass had been removed decades earlier and a 4-inch slab of concrete poured on top of the ground. It was family reunion week, and I was in the middle of a game with my uncle, the firefighter.

I chased a ball that had bounced wild after I missed a shot. I wasn’t paying attention to where the edge was. My foot landed half on and half off the court. My ankle twisted hard, and before I knew what had happened I was on the ground. The swelling started before I could even sit up.

My uncle ran over to me and gave me a hand. I tried to put weight on my foot, but my ankle buckled. In First Responder fashion, my uncle immediately dropped to his knees and inspected my ankle. He felt around and could tell it wasn’t broken, but I couldn’t walk.

Of course, like any stubborn teenager would do, I told him I was fine, and tried to stand again.

I wasn’t fine.

It turned out to be a mild sprain, the kind my older brother seemed to collect every third week. To protect his ankles, he wore braces anytime he played ball. I, on the other hand, had never experienced this before. The shock of the injury was worse than the injury itself.

For two days, I hopped on one leg from the cabin to the dining hall, from the bed to the bathroom. The cabin my family stayed in sat on the opposite side of the property from the lodge where we gathered for meals, so I mostly gave up and stayed in. I read. I watched the others play. I hated missing basketball more than anything else.

The swelling went down, and within a week I was back on the court. That’s all it took. One week. A blip on the calendar. As a teenager coming up on the end of summer vacation, that week didn’t feel small at all. It somehow felt like I’d lost something important.

The way our bodies can heal themselves is miraculous, and perhaps a conversation for another day.

Healing often feels like that week in the summer I had to watch while my friends played ball. It didn’t feel like progress—only like I was missing out. You can’t feel the process of your body knitting itself back together. But you can certainly feel the frustration of not being able to move the way you want. You feel time crawling.

You feel left out.

Even then, I knew the pain was temporary. I’d watched my brother sprain both his ankles multiple times, so I knew what to expect. As expected, the pain faded as my ankle healed. But, like I said, while I was in it, I didn’t notice any improvement. I couldn’t see the swelling go down hour by hour. I couldn’t tell when the tendons started to hold again. I only knew I wasn’t where I wanted to be.

That’s been true of other kinds of healing too. Emotional wounds don’t announce when they’re closing. Some days I still feel like I’m right back where I started, carrying the same weight I’ve been hauling for years. But if I look back carefully, I can see what I’ve set down along the way. The burdens I don’t carry anymore.

More often than not, I have to catch myself before I stoop down to pick them up again.

It’s easy to forget that letting go is progress too. We tell ourselves stories about needing to power through, needing to arrive somewhere obvious, measurable, final. Healing rarely offers that. It offers something far more subtle.

You notice it when you realize what no longer hurts. When a word that once cut deep doesn’t sting as much. When you remember an old failure and find it doesn’t keep you up at night anymore. When you sit in the middle of an ordinary moment — folding a towel, reheating leftovers, waiting in the car — and realize you’re not bracing against pain the way you once did.

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to measure recovery like progress on a scoreboard. As though the only way to know I’m okay is to be back on the court, sprinting at full speed. But that’s not how most healing happens. It’s slower. Uneven. Often invisible.

Some days it feels like hopping on one leg across a campground, frustrated and tired. Other days it feels like sitting still when I’d rather be moving. But then there are the moments when I notice what I’m no longer carrying, what I can do now that I couldn’t do before. And that’s when I know: the healing has been happening all along.

It doesn’t feel like progress. But it is.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

The Cost of Chasing Peace

 

Photo by Niko Huumonen on Unsplash

I used to sit in the car outside my son’s karate practice with the windows rolled down and my laptop balanced on my knees. The smell of the pizza place on the corner and the sounds of cars passing by provided a nice backdrop, like white noise for my messy thoughts. I wasn’t doing anything remarkable. Just typing out whatever thoughts I had that week, letting words tumble onto the page.

Those essays didn’t have a theme. They weren’t part of a series. I didn’t much care if anyone read them. The small dopamine hit of a new follower was nice, sure, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to sit still long enough to hear myself think, and then give those thoughts somewhere to go. Looking back, maybe that was the closest I’ve had to peace in long time.

I didn’t have to do anything to earn it. It wasn’t planned. I just found it sitting in the parking lot. Waiting.

I haven’t sat like that much in 25 years. These days I chase deadlines and client deliverables. I build faster because the tools let me build faster. AI writes most of my boilerplate code now, and that speed feels intoxicating. But it’s also dangerous. It’s easy to trust something that looks like it works until a flaw reveals itself later — costly, embarrassing, sometimes catastrophic.

Haste makes waste. I know that. But still I rush. Because somewhere in me I believe peace lives on the other side of success — if I can just get everything finished, then I’ll breathe easier. If I can hold the business together, then I’ll finally rest.

But I never get there. The peace I keep chasing always runs just ahead, like the mirage of a finish line that moves every time I near it.

I think back to those nights at karate. No one needed me in that hour. No one cared how many words I typed. Peace was already there, waiting for me in the car with the windows rolled down. I didn’t have to earn it.

Maybe that’s the cost of chasing peace — it blinds me to the peace already present, waiting in ordinary places.

I don’t know yet how to stop running. But I’m learning to notice. And today, that’s a start.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

Trying to Catch the Thoughts That Keep Running

 

Photo by Brian Metzler on Unsplash

I remember sitting in Professor Balk’s class during my junior year at the University of Utah. I was staring at the chalkboard, not understanding any of what he was saying or writing.

Our homework that night was three problems. Just three. A problem set like that would often take me four or more hours to solve. The answers were never neat. So often, I would crumble the paper up in frustration—exactly like in the movies—and throw it forcefully in the metal garbage can by my desk in my grandparents’ basement.

I would often write out page after page of “solution” until my hands ached. Finding the right solution almost always felt like trying to carry boiling water in my hands.

Incredibly, the worst part wasn’t even the math. It was the language. Professor Balk was brilliant, I’m sure, but his English slipped in and out, and half the time the lecture dissolved into sounds I couldn’t parse. I’d sit there, pencil poised, hoping for one clear phrase that could anchor me; help me understand. Instead, the problems kept running away. By the end of the semester, I limped out with a C-, salvaged only because I haunted his office hours until he took pity on me.

That feeling — that mixture of exhaustion, frustration, and a strange sense that the answer was always just out of reach — isn’t all that different from my life now. The thoughts don’t stop. They run circles around me: deadlines, payroll, cash flow, onboarding new developers, being the kind of father my kids deserve, the kind of husband my wife deserves. Each role pulls me in a different direction, and I’m supposed to find the solution set that satisfies all of them.

I tell myself if I just work harder, sleep less, push a little further, I’ll catch up. But the truth is, I never do. It’s like chasing an equation I don’t have the right tools to solve.

Sometimes I imagine my work like a Potemkin Village — those hollow facades built to impress passing dignitaries. From the road, the houses look perfect. Paint on the shutters, smoke curling from chimneys. But walk behind them and you’ll find nothing: no walls, no foundations, just empty scaffolding holding up the illusion. That’s how my business feels most days. Clients see deliverables, invoices, progress. My team sees direction. But behind it, I’m bracing the beams with my own shoulders, patching cracks with duct tape, hoping no one notices how flimsy it all feels. And hoping I don’t get crushed when one of the walls finally falls.

The cost is high. Sleepless nights. A body wired with restlessness. Conversations with my kids where my brain is still running numbers in the background. Moments with my wife when I want to be present but I’m not. Anxiety that crackles like electricity through my whole body.

And underneath it all, the words that echo: fraud, charlatan, imposter. They slip in when I make mistakes, when I feel my team looking for guidance I’m not sure I can give. They whisper that I don’t deserve any of this, that sooner or later everyone will see I was faking it.

The one thought I keep trying to catch, the one that always runs just a little faster than me, is simpler: You’re enough. I can almost see it, almost hold it, before it slides away again.

Maybe someday I’ll learn how to stop running after every equation, every impossible variable. Maybe I’ll learn to believe the thought that keeps escaping.

Maybe the cost of chasing peace is that, somehow, I keep running past it.

For now, all I can do is keep reaching, keep trying, keep holding onto the hope that I don’t have to prove my worth by solving every problem in front of me.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of my reflections on identity, meaning, and building a life I don’t want to run away from.

You can check it out here:

Aaron Pace on Books.by

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live? You Don't Have to Escape to Be Free…

books.by