I love singing, and when I was nineteen years old, I had the privilege of participating in a religious choir made up almost entirely of young men who were nineteen or twenty years old. I was only part of the choir for about three months, but they are months I will never forget.
Our choir director lost three of his children in a car accident on Christmas Day as they traveled home from school for family activities. For a month afterward, he was absent from our rehearsals. When he returned, he stood in front of a room filled with young men who couldn’t comprehend the depth of his grief and told us about finding peace amidst tragedy-induced sorrow.
He read the words of a poem by Emma Lou Thayne called “Where Can I Turn for Peace?”
The poem opens with these lines:
Where can I turn for peace?
Where is my solace
When other sources cease to make me whole?
Thayne’s words were set to music by Joleen G. Meredith in 1971. As the story goes, Thayne called Meredith and read the poem to her over the telephone while Meredith composed the melody on the spot.
I have always loved that song, although I understood very little about the question when I was nineteen.
Where is my solace?
I don’t have a lot of peace in my life right now. The chaos of trying to hold together a business that has run out of money, inching two enterprise software products toward market readiness, working a full-time job to keep the lights on in my own home, and navigating the changes that come when children begin leaving the nest weighs on me every day. These pressures stacked on top of each other as they arrived in quick sequence. They’re all crowded together in the same mental space as they demand attention with roughly equal urgency.
I gained almost fifty pounds in two years, so my natural response has been to continue eating the same way because I eat my emotions and then attempt to outrun the consequences. This week, after barely running at all during the first half of 2026, I logged forty-five miles, nineteen of them in a single day. I won’t lie to you by calling this some kind of fitness strategy and sell you a course. It’s a prolonged negotiation with my own nervous system. Plain and simple.
I don’t enjoy running for running’s sake. I’ve never experienced the runner’s high people talk about, unless the runner’s high is the deep satisfaction of finally stopping. Running, for me, creates a space where my mind can finally become quiet.
There are only two places in my life where I consistently find that kind of peace: while listening to beautiful music and while running.
After enough miles of my feet hitting the pavement, my breathing settles into a rhythm. Fatigue pushes everything else to the margins until I don’t have any room left to rehearse business problems, financial fears, family concerns, or the long inventory of things I alternately celebrate and condemn about how I did things in my business. I can only think about the next step and the next breath, and maybe how many miles I’ve got left before I can lay down without making strangers think I died in the gutter.
Music reaches the same place for me, just from a different route. There’s nothing like a beautiful melody that can hold sorrow without offering up any explanation. It can also give shape to emotions that can’t ever be explained in words.
John P. Weiss recently wrote:
The many indignities, hardships, losses, and vicissitudes of life wear us down. We look in the mirror and see a different person staring back at us. Someone with life’s journey etched across our features and a corresponding understanding that time is growing thin.
I’m not sure how many people in their late forties regularly contemplate time growing thin. I do.
My mother died when she was thirty-nine years old. I am now nine years older than she ever was. Her death changed my relationship with time. Every birthday I’ve celebrated since I turned thirty-nine has felt like borrowed time.
I think about death frequently. The thoughts aren’t morbid, usually. They’re more like the occasional speculation about what’s over the horizon. I wonder what will eventually get me: cancer, a heart attack, excessive Diet Dr Pepper consumption, or the slow wearing-down Weiss describes, with life’s journey etched across my features and my mind gradually surrendering to Alzheimer’s or dementia.
Truthfully, none of us gets much control over the final answer. We can exercise, eat vegetables, sleep regularly, and reduce our daily intake of beverages large enough to require two hands, yet mortality remains remarkably uninterested in our personal optimization plans. A good friend who was the epitome of fitness dropped dead of a heart attack at sixty-five.
I suppose it’s that awareness of death that intensifies my hunger for peace. When we’re young, time feels limitless, and we can tolerate years of low-grade anxiety because we assume we’ll eventually arrive somewhere calmer. We’ll finish the project, earn the money, pay off the debt, get the children out on their own, repair the house, lose the weight, and finally, finally reach the point when peace becomes convenient.
But as the years pass, we begin to question whether the arrival of peace will ever really be a permanent condition.
We spend so much of our lives racing forward. We work to earn a living, provide for our families, raise children who can become decent human beings in a broken world, and prepare for disasters we hope never happen. Underneath it all? That’s where the steady current of anxiety lives. Something will always need attention. Someone, maybe a child, will always need help. There will always be another bill due. The body will continue to age. And dreams won’t arrive on the predicted and anticipated schedule.
Then one day, you wake up and realize you are older. Some of your children have moved out. They’ve entered the same rat race you’ve been running, and now they are beginning to absorb the same low-grade anxiety that followed you through adulthood.
The anxiety morphs to fit the phase of life. When children are small, you basically worry about keeping them alive by teaching them not to lick shopping carts, stick forks in wall sockets, and make decent choices. When they become adults, you suddenly discover how little control you had which shouldn’t be surprising because thousands of generations have done this before and arrived at the same conclusion. Control is an illusion.
One may live halfway around the world. Another may face problems you’re not equipped to help them solve. You can listen, offer counsel, send money when you have it, and answer a video call from thousands of miles away. You can’t stand between them and every difficult thing.
There’s grief in that realization, but there’s also peace in it too. Love, real love, eventually requires us to let go of the illusion that we can protect the people we care about from every sorrow. We can remain available, answer the phone when they text (or call), and sit with them through uncertainty. We can (and should) stop pretending that love always has a solution.
Maybe that’s why we long for solace. We’re all carrying so many things we can’t fix.
We can’t reverse a car accident that took three children from their parents on Christmas day. We can’t go back to 1993 and save a mother who has already been gone for decades. We also can’t guarantee that a business will succeed, that a product will succeed, that our children will remain safe and make good choices, or that our bodies will give us as many years as we would like.
Solace gives us somewhere to set those realities down for a little while.
It can’t get rid of them. Those things will always be part of this mortal condition. My business will still not have money when the song ends. My children will still be far away when the video call disconnects. The grief is still grief when the choir rehearsal is over. And the miles I run don’t solve the problems waiting for me at home.
This is the point though: something changes while we’re there.
For a few moments, sorrow becomes bearable. Somehow, our minds loosen their grip on the anxiety just a little and our breathing becomes easier. That’s when we remember that life can hold uncertainty and beauty at the same time.
At nineteen years old, I listened to a grieving father talk about peace. Now, decades later, I’m beginning to understand why the question posed in Thayne’s poem mattered so much.
Where can I turn for peace? Where is my solace when the ordinary sources of security, approval, and control can’t make me whole?
Sometimes I find it in a song written over the telephone more than fifty years ago. Sometimes I find it several miles into a run, after exhaustion has finally quieted every sound except my feet on the pavement and my breathing.
I think I’m finally beginning to understand that solace isn’t what comes when life becomes less complicated because it won’t. Solace is what helps us live while the complications remain.
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