I posted something on Facebook this week and surprised myself with its urgency. I wrote that the Monks for Peace, now on day 84 of a 2,300-mile walk from Fort Worth to DC, accompanied by a dog named Aloka, are providing the recalibration this society needs in the midst of ICE violence, gun violence, and these generally violent times, that make some of us shudder like a dog experiencing firecrackers or the “others” in Pluribus suffering a seizure in the presence of rage, or like the hyperstimulated HPA (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal) axis, that we learn about as professionals who address stress.
And then, inexplicably, I was sent back to ninth-grade trigonometry.
I wasn’t an excellent student. But I must have been an attentive one, because what stayed with me all these years weren’t the theorems, I couldn’t reconstruct them now, beyond knowing that if you are working with a right-angled triangle then sine is a ratio represented by Opposite side/Hypotenuse, cosine is Adjacent side/Hypotenuse and tangent is Opposite/Adjacent, but I remember the graphs, I have great recall for the shapes of things. Sine curves. Cosine curves. Those beautiful, undulating waves also represent life, sound, and light moving through peaks and troughs with amplitude and frequency. The rhythm of oscillation.
And then there was the tangent curve.
I don’t remember the math of it, but I remember the shape: it didn’t come back. It kept going and going and going. It approached something, infinity, maybe, or breakdown, but it never returned to the center. It never cycled. At certain points, the graph just... broke. Became undefined.
That’s what I feel when I watch the news these days. We’re not on a sine curve anymore, where there are peaks and troughs, yes, but also the promise of return. Things don’t make sense unless there is a promise of return; all musical compositions return to the tonic (unless you love atonal music like Sting). Music makes no sense if you can’t anticipate a return. But we’re on a tangent. We absorb images of ICE raids that feel relentlessly cruel, mass shootings that blur into one another, and climate disasters that are normalized as “the new normal.” This trajectory doesn’t oscillate; it is a graph approaching its asymptote.
And then my social media started bringing me images of monks. Walking. Day 84. A dog named Aloka, whose name means “light.” They are like a long-lost tuning fork, teaching us to reconsider vibrating at this frequency.
They aren’t protesting, exactly. They aren’t demanding policy change or issuing statements. They’re doing something more fundamental. They’re reintroducing periodicity. Footstep by footstep, mile by mile, they’re saying: there is still rhythm. There is still time. We can return to the wave.
And here’s what makes this act sinusoidal, what proves the curve is being restored: the people approaching them. Police officers. Sheriff’s deputies. The very ones who, in certain law enforcement scenarios, can go off on a tangent, drunk on their own state-sanctioned power; use of force escalating, authority overreaching, violence becoming trajectory rather than aberration. They’re coming to the monks in peace. Getting sacred threads tied to their wrists, having protection prayers said over them, and pinning their badges to the monks’ robes.
They’re choosing the wave. They’re choosing return.
This is what recalibration looks like—not a rejection of peaks and troughs, those will always come in any living system—but a refusal of the tangent. And the proof is in who shows up. The ones who carry the tools of state power, the ones trained in force, are approaching as if thirsty for it. As if they, too, have been living on a curve heading toward infinity and finally, finally, someone is offering the path back.
I think about this in my own work—in coaching, in public health, in the systems I try to understand and sometimes influence. What does it mean to choose sine over tangent? What does it mean to practice return? To walk, even when the destination feels impossibly far? To bring a dog, because joy and companionship are also part of the recalibration?
Maybe spiritual practice isn’t escapism. Maybe it’s a mathematical necessity. Maybe the monks know what ninth-grade me absorbed but couldn’t yet name: that waves can hold us, but tangents will break us.
And maybe, 2,300 miles later, we’ll remember how to oscillate again.