So there’s this board game called Dark Side Rising. It’s based on Star Wars and features Darth Vader, so I guess you could say it’s pure fantasy. 

But every morning, when I get up and read the headlines, I smack right into things that aren’t fantasy: continuing racism, sexism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, violent pointless arguments, the Taliban yanking Afghanistan backward into the Dark Ages. 

The dark side rising.

Sometimes, I just go right back to bed. 

But then, after lying in defeat for a while, I remember something. We live in a dualistic reality. For every up, there is a down. For every night, there is a day. 

I even did research on this, back in my academic days. I was looking at the violent political arguments around women’s rights. And what I found was this:

There’s far more peace and good sense in the human population than there is rage and nonsense. It’s just that as the craziness gets louder and louder, the sanity gets more and more quiet.

This doesn’t mean that good people just lounge around passively in difficult times. It means that in troubled times, we are driven to our personal inner sanctuary, the center core of peace that is our essential self.

It’s very quiet in there, very still. And very, very powerful.

In my own research, I found that the deafening, shrill arguments were coming from a minority of people. The rest were watching with compassion, getting more and more grounded in the values of justice and acceptance. 

Over time, it was the growing peace of these quiet folks, not the frenzied arguments of the few, that spread into our society as a whole.

So if you’re afraid of the dark side rising, rest assured that the light side is rising in equal measure. Its silence makes it invisible, but also incredibly powerful. 

You can feel it in yourself, right now. Turn your attention inward and dive down, through the surface level of worry and overwhelm, down to the center of yourself where you know things for sure. Be still. Feel the light rising.