Laura: The average person spends about 60 minutes a day stuck in traffic or waiting in lines. Most of us see that as wasted time. A Vietnamese monk, exiled for his peace activism, saw it as a secret opportunity for enlightenment. Sophia: Whoa. Okay, that’s a perspective shift. My 45-minute commute feels more like a daily descent into madness, not a path to nirvana. So who is this monk, and what’s his secret? Laura: That monk was Thich Nhat Hanh, and his book is Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. And what’s truly incredible is that this man, who taught millions how to find peace in a traffic jam, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr. himself for his work trying to stop the Vietnam War. Sophia: Wow. Okay, that changes everything. This isn't just some feel-good wellness guide from someone living in an isolated monastery. This is wisdom forged in the middle of intense, real-world conflict. That context makes his ideas about peace feel so much more… earned. Laura: Exactly. He wasn't just meditating on peace; he was what he called an "Engaged Buddhist," actively working for it, which led to him being exiled from his own country for nearly four decades. And his core insight, the one that made him so influential, is almost shockingly simple. Sophia: I’m ready. Where do we even start with a life and a philosophy that big? Laura: We start small. Deceptively small. We start at the kitchen sink.

Laura: Thich Nhat Hanh argues that we are brilliant at preparing to live, but terrible at actually living. We’re always rushing to the next thing—finish the dishes to watch TV, finish work to start the weekend, finish the commute to finally be home. His radical idea is that peace isn't waiting for you at the destination. It's available in the process. Sophia: I can definitely relate to that. My brain is always three steps ahead. While I’m doing one thing, I’m mentally planning the next three. It’s exhausting. Laura: He has a whole meditation on washing dishes that perfectly captures this. He says that while you're washing the bowls, you should be washing the bowls. You should be completely aware of the dish, the warm water, the soap, the movement of your hands. He writes, and this line has always stuck with me, "If I am incapable of washing dishes joyfully, if I want to finish them quickly so I can go and have dessert, I will be equally incapable of enjoying my dessert." Sophia: Huh. Because I'll be thinking about what's next after the dessert. Checking my phone, or thinking about the next day's to-do list. It’s a cycle. Laura: It’s a constant state of arrival, but never being present. He’s saying the dishes aren't an obstacle to the good part of your evening; the dishes are a part of your evening. And your life is made up of these small moments. If you rush through all of them, you’re rushing through your entire life. Sophia: Okay, I get the poetry of it, but my reality is a mountain of dirty dishes after a long day. It feels like a chore, not a miracle. How do you actually make that mental leap from 'Ugh, this again' to 'Ah, a moment of peace'? Laura: It starts with the breath. That’s his anchor for everything. He suggests a simple verse you can say to yourself: "Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile." It sounds almost too simple to work, but it’s about interrupting the automatic pilot of your mind. It’s a conscious choice. And the smile isn't a fake, plastered-on grin. He points to research showing that just the physical act of forming a smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your face and send signals to your nervous system that you are safe and content. Sophia: So you’re tricking your brain into a state of calm? Laura: You could see it that way. Or you're just reminding it of a truth it has forgotten: that in this exact second, standing at the sink, you are alive, you have water, you have a body that works. He applies this everywhere. Driving, for instance. For most of us, a red light is an enemy. It’s a frustration. It’s in our way. Sophia: It’s a personal attack from the universe, specifically designed to make me late. Laura: Right! But he suggests seeing the red light as a "bell of mindfulness." It’s a friend, reminding you to stop, come back to your body, and breathe. Just for those 30 or 60 seconds. It’s a forced pause, a gift of time to just be. Instead of tensing up and checking your watch, you breathe in, you breathe out, and you arrive in the present moment. Sophia: That’s a powerful reframe. The idea that the things that irritate us most in our day—the traffic, the waiting, the ringing phone—are actually invitations to practice. He has one for the telephone too, doesn't he? Laura: He does! He says the phone ringing often creates a jolt of anxiety. Who is it? What do they want? So he suggests a "Telephone Meditation." When the phone rings, you don't grab it. You let it ring twice. On the first ring, you breathe in and say to yourself, "Listen, listen." On the second ring, you breathe out and smile, acknowledging that someone is thinking of you. Then you pick up the phone, fully present and calm. Sophia: Honestly, my phone ringing gives me a jolt of anxiety every single time. The idea of stopping to breathe feels almost impossible, but also incredibly necessary. It’s like he’s identified all these tiny, universal moments of modern stress and offered a simple, two-second antidote for each one. Laura: And that’s the genius of it. He’s not asking you to add an hour of meditation to your already busy day. He’s asking you to transform the moments you already have. He tells a beautiful story about eating a cookie when he was a four-year-old boy. His mother would give him one, and he would take it outside and eat it so slowly, savoring every single crumb, looking at the sky, feeling the dog at his feet. He was fully present because he had nothing to worry about. He asks, why can't we eat our meals that way now? Sophia: Because we're eating at our desks while answering emails, or in front of the TV while scrolling through news about a world on fire. It feels like we’ve lost that ability. Laura: But his point is that it’s not lost. It’s just buried. And we can find it again. But here’s where it gets really interesting. He argues that finding that personal peace, that "cookie of childhood" moment, isn't just for your own benefit. It’s a profound act of global significance. Sophia: Okay, that’s the leap I’m curious about. How does me being calm in traffic possibly connect to solving the world's problems? It feels like a stretch. Laura: It is. A huge, beautiful, mind-bending stretch. And it’s all wrapped up in a word he coined: "Interbeing."

Laura: Thich Nhat Hanh introduces this concept of "Interbeing" to explain that nothing exists by itself. Everything "inter-is." To make it concrete, he uses the example of a simple sheet of paper. Sophia: Okay, I have a sheet of paper on my desk. It seems pretty self-contained. It’s just… paper. Laura: But is it? He asks you to look deeply. If you do, you'll see a cloud floating in it. Without the cloud, there’s no rain. Without rain, the trees can't grow. So the cloud is in the paper. And if you look deeper, you see the sunshine. The sun is essential for the tree to exist. So the sunshine is in the paper. Sophia: I see where this is going. The logger who cut the tree is in the paper. The logger’s parents are in the paper. The wheat that made the bread the logger ate for breakfast is in the paper. Laura: Exactly! And even you are in the paper. Your mind, perceiving it, is part of its reality in this moment. So the paper is made up of only "non-paper" elements. It can't exist by itself. It inter-is with everything else in the cosmos. To be is to inter-be. Sophia: That's a beautiful idea, that everything is connected. It’s poetic and makes a lot of sense. But the book applies this to really dark stuff, too. He talks about flowers and garbage inter-being. How does that work? Laura: That's where the concept gets its teeth. He says an organic gardener looking at a beautiful rose can see the garbage that it will become in a week. And looking at a pile of garbage, that same gardener can see the beautiful vegetables or the rose that it will become after it’s composted. The rose and the garbage need each other. One can't exist without the other. They inter-are. Sophia: So there’s no absolute separation between what we call beautiful and what we call ugly, or pure and impure. Laura: Precisely. And he takes this one step further, into the realm of human suffering, in a way that is deeply challenging. He tells the story of a young girl in Manila forced into prostitution to support her family. We see her as a victim, as someone "impure." We see the "good girls" from wealthy families as "pure." But Thich Nhat Hanh, through the lens of Interbeing, says the good girl is able to be a good girl because the other girl is a prostitute. Society is structured in a way that their fates are linked. The wealth of one is connected to the poverty of the other. Sophia: Wow. That is… uncomfortable. It dismantles the idea that we are separate from the world's suffering. It makes us complicit. Laura: It makes us responsible. And this is where his life as a peace activist really informs his spirituality. During the Vietnam War, he saw so much suffering. He tells a story about learning of a twelve-year-old girl on a refugee boat who was raped by a sea pirate and threw herself into the ocean. His first reaction was pure rage at the pirate. He couldn't imagine being able to live if he were that pirate. Sophia: A completely understandable human reaction. Laura: But then he meditated on it. He looked deeply, with the eyes of Interbeing. He imagined what it would be like to be born in the pirate's village, to be raised in those conditions of poverty and violence, to have no education or compassion shown to him. And he realized that if he had lived the pirate's life, he might have become the pirate. Sophia: That is an incredible act of empathy. To see yourself in the perpetrator, not just the victim. Laura: It led him to write a famous poem called "Call Me by My True Names." In it, he says, "I am the twelve-year-old girl... and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving." He asks us to see that both exist within us and within our world. And that true compassion, the kind that can actually lead to peace and reconciliation, is only possible when we stop seeing an "us" versus "them." When we see that we inter-are with everyone. Sophia: So when he says "Peace is every step," he doesn't just mean your walk to the mailbox. He means that every mindful action, every moment of cultivated inner peace, is a step that changes the fabric of this interconnected reality. By transforming your own anger, you are removing a tiny bit of the world's anger. Laura: You are. Because your anger isn't just your anger. It's a seed that was likely passed to you by your parents, who got it from their parents, in a long chain of suffering. He tells a powerful story of a 14-year-old boy who, through mindfulness, stopped himself from shouting at his little sister when she fell, breaking the cycle of anger he’d learned from his own father. That small act of stopping, of breathing, was an act of peace for future generations. Sophia: It’s a huge responsibility, but it’s also incredibly empowering. It means you’re not helpless. Your inner state has an outer impact. Laura: That’s the core of Engaged Buddhism. Mindfulness isn't a retreat from the world; it's the foundation from which you engage with it. He says, "Peace work means, first of all, being peace."

Sophia: So it’s not a linear path. It’s a circle. You start with your own breath, your own dishes... and by looking deeply enough, you find the entire universe there. And that awareness of the universe, of your connection to the cloud and the sun and the pirate and the child, then informs how you go back and wash the next dish. Laura: Exactly. The book's title, Peace Is Every Step, is the whole teaching. Peace isn’t the destination you reach after years of meditation. It’s available in the step you are taking right now. It's in the breath you are taking right now. The book is so highly-rated and has had such a lasting cultural impact because it takes this profound, ancient wisdom and makes it radically, beautifully simple. Sophia: It feels less like a self-help book and more like a user's manual for being human in a complicated world. It gives you a tool that is always with you: your own awareness. Laura: And it’s a tool for both survival and transformation. The challenge he leaves us with is simple, and it’s something I think we can all try. What is one daily routine you currently treat as an obstacle? It could be your commute, making lunches, answering emails. Sophia: For me, it’s definitely folding laundry. The endless pile. Laura: Okay, so the challenge is this: what would happen if, just once, you treated that task not as something to get through, but as the main event of that moment in your life? If you focused only on the fabric, the movement, your breath. Not to become a laundry-folding champion, but just to see what it feels like to be fully present for five minutes. Sophia: That’s a great question to end on. It’s a small step, but I guess that’s the whole point. Laura: This is Aibrary, signing off.