Self-Help Book in Revision: The Missing Peace(s)

This is an excerpt from a self-help manuscript of my own that I’m currently revising. The book draws on lived experience, spiritual philosophy, and intuitive guidance, much of it gathered from interviews I conducted with a wide range of people. The goal is to help readers reconnect with their own inner wisdom and reclaim a sense of meaning, peace, and clarity in their lives and create it in the world around them, especially during times of chaos and confusion.
(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript.)

I was going 90 miles an hour and missed clipping him by a mere five or six inches. I was heading south in the left lane on the I-65 in Alabama, when suddenly, another car slowly drifted into my lane from the right and crossed in front of me. Fortunately, he kept drifting until he was in the grassy median between the north and southbound lanes of the highway. It was over in the blink of an eye, but it felt like time expanded as I looked to my left and saw the car roll slowly down the gradient and finally stop in the long divot in the middle of the median. The driver, a balding, middle-aged man wearing a crimson University of Alabama sweatshirt, seemed to be passed out, his glasses askew on his face. I remember thinking he looked like a professor. 

I pulled over on the shoulder of the right lane and called 911. I told them what happened and that I was afraid the man might have had a stroke or something. I explained that they would find him in his car about half a mile behind me, giving them the number of the closest milepost I could see. I waited for an ambulance, anxiously watching the man’s car for any sign of life while semis and pickup trucks bulleted past where I stood with my car, only a few feet separating me from their velocity and motion. They constantly obscured my sight of the man but I tried to keep my eye on him. After about 20 minutes of waiting, the emergency crew still hadn’t arrived. Instead, I watched in surprised relief as the man seemed to wake up. He inched his little gold sedan back up onto the highway and safely took off again, disappearing into the same direction we’d originally been heading. 

For years, everything about life made me feel like I was stuck in the moment that the stranger’s car crossed into my lane—it looked like a crash was imminent and felt like it was going to be deadly. As I began to find a small measure of peace within my meditation practice, I experienced the same relief I felt when the man’s car drifted into the median instead, and I was finally able to exhale. Just as the two of us had been given a reprieve, the insights I was gaining began to give me hope for the future. I had a chance to live another day and do it better than I did before.

Meanwhile, an urgent nagging feeling has still been building. It’s been telling me that my best chance for survival is to really find peace on the deepest level possible and share it with the world around me. At my core, I know that our best chance to improve our experience in the world is to not only find peace, but to create it—in spite of the chaos still spinning around us and threatening to tip the scale in the wrong direction.

We’ll never be able to stop disorder completely, but through the process of conducting the interviews in this book and developing it into a flowing narrative, I’ve learned that there are things we can do to alter our trajectory and aim for a better outcome. I am profoundly grateful to each person who participated in this project and for all of the things they taught me.

💬 Ready to bring your story or manuscript to life?
I offer ghostwriting, developmental editing, and manuscript polishing tailored to your unique voice and vision.
👉 Contact Me to start the conversation.