There is a particular quality to a Sunday morning in Querétaro that I have come to love. The streets carry the unhurried sounds of families heading to breakfast, of vendors setting up, of a city that knows how to hold both its history and its present in the same breath. I have written before about how this place teaches me things my training never could, about time, about presence, about what it means to belong somewhere that is still teaching you its language.
Today that Sunday morning was interrupted. News broke early that the Mexican military had killed the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in a special forces operation in Tapalpa, Jalisco. Within hours, retaliation spread across multiple states. Burning vehicles blocked highways. Smoke rose over Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. Flights were canceled. Schools were shut down. The U.S. Embassy issued shelter-in-place warnings for citizens across several states. The ordinary rhythms of a country I call home were replaced, for a time, by something far more volatile.
I am not going to offer political analysis here. I am not a journalist, and the complexity of cartel violence in México, its roots in poverty, in demand from north of the border, in decades of institutional failure, in the human capacity for both cruelty and courage, deserves more than a paragraph from a psychologist. What I want to write about is what it means to stay present inside a day like this. What it asks of a person. What it reveals.
The Temptation to Look Away
When violence erupts in the place where you live, the nervous system responds before the mind catches up. There is an immediate contraction, a pulling inward, a scanning for threat. This is ancient biology doing what it was designed to do. The challenge, and it is a real challenge, is what happens next. Because after the initial surge, a choice presents itself. You can collapse into the fear and let it organize your entire experience. You can retreat into abstraction, treating the event as something happening to other people in another place. Or you can stay. Present. Awake to what is actually unfolding, in your body, in your neighborhood, in the country that holds you.
In Paradise (re)Discovered, I write about the space between stimulus and response as the territory where genuine development lives. That space is not a concept. It is a practice, one that is tested most fiercely when the circumstances give you every reason to abandon it. A day like today is not an invitation to perform calm. It is an invitation to practice the kind of presence that can hold fear without being governed by it, that can acknowledge danger without surrendering to despair. The fear does not need to disappear for you to remain steady. It needs to be held within something larger than itself.
What Violence Obscures
México is not its violence. The country I wake up in every morning, the one that has reshaped my understanding of what it means to live with the sacred woven into the ordinary, is not captured by the headlines that will circulate today and tomorrow. The smoke over Guadalajara is real. The suffering of ordinary families caught in the crossfire is real and must not be minimized. And the full truth of this country includes the vendor who will be back at her stall tomorrow morning, the neighbor who checks on the elderly woman down the street without being asked, the community that gathers after disruption to rebuild what was damaged, the culture that has survived centuries of upheaval by holding onto something that efficiency-driven societies have largely forgotten: that presence is the appropriate response to what cannot be controlled.
The people who suffer most from cartel violence are not tourists whose flights are canceled. They are the families in Jalisco and Michoacán and Guanajuato and Tamaulipas who navigate this reality as a daily fact of life, who send their children to school with a prayer and keep living with a resilience that deserves far more attention than the spectacle of burning buses. When international coverage reduces this country to its most violent moments, something essential is lost. The reduction is its own kind of violence, a flattening of a complex, living, breathing nation into a single narrative of danger.
I have learned, living here, that the impulse to reduce what is complex into what is manageable is one of the ego's most persistent habits. It is the same impulse that reduces a person to their worst moment, a relationship to its most painful chapter, a life to the parts that did not go as planned. The work of authentic perception, the kind I explore in my writing and my clinical practice, moves in the opposite direction. It insists on staying with the full picture even when the full picture is uncomfortable. It asks us to hold the violence and the tenderness in the same gaze, not because they cancel each other out, but because both are true and the refusal to hold both is a failure of seeing.
Steadiness Is Not the Absence of Shaking
One of the ideas I return to often, in my own life and in my work with coaching clients, is that steadiness is not the same thing as stillness. Steadiness is the quality of a person who has been through enough to trust their own capacity to stay present without needing conditions to cooperate. It does not require the absence of fear. It does not require resolution. It requires the willingness to remain in contact with what is happening, in the body, in the community, in the moment, without collapsing into reactivity or retreating into numbness.
Today is a day that asks for steadiness. Not the performed version that pretends everything is fine. The real version, the one that acknowledges the shaking and chooses to remain present anyway. The one that checks on neighbors. The one that sits with the discomfort of not knowing what comes next. The one that refuses to let a single terrible day define an entire country or an entire life.
I think of what the depth psychologist James Hollis has written about the difference between a life of comfort and a life of meaning. A meaningful life does not avoid the difficult. It develops the capacity to meet the difficult with enough of oneself intact to learn from it, to be changed by it without being destroyed by it. That capacity is not something you develop once and carry forever. It is something you practice, again and again, in the specific texture of each day you are given.
Paradise in the Ruins
The word paradise gets misused so often that its real meaning has nearly been lost. It is not a place free from suffering. It is a quality of consciousness that can meet suffering without looking away. It is what becomes available when the defenses that usually organize our perception have loosened enough to allow reality in, all of reality, the beautiful and the terrible, the sacred and the broken. The moments after disruption, when the ordinary has been stripped away and you are left with only what is actually here, are paradoxically the moments when this kind of seeing becomes most possible.
I do not say this to romanticize what is happening today. There is nothing romantic about burning vehicles and families sheltering in fear. What I am saying is that even inside a day like this, the capacity for presence and authentic engagement with life does not disappear. It is tested. And the testing is where the real work lives.
Tomorrow morning, the vendors will return. The streets will fill again. The city will resume its rhythms, carrying today's events the way this country has always carried its difficult histories: with grief, with resilience, and with a stubborn insistence on continuing to live. In Puerto Vallarta, where smoke rose over the coastline today and tourists ran through the airport in panic, there are families who did not have the option of a canceled flight home. They are home. This is their home. That fact deserves to sit at the center of how we hold what happened today, not at the margins.
Staying present when the world shakes is not a skill reserved for monks or mystics. It is the daily practice of anyone who has decided that looking away is no longer an option, that the life they are building requires them to remain in contact with what is real. That practice is at the heart of everything I write about in Paradise (re)Discovered, and today it is not theory. It is Sunday afternoon in México, and the work is as close as the next breath.
With care,
Mark
Writing from home in Querétaro