B-Side

Tic Toc

I was thinking about TikTok the other day — not the app, just the word — and something clicked.

Tic toc. The sound of a clock. The sound of the present moment passing. The sound of right now becoming a second ago. And I thought: someone already built an entire philosophy around that sound. Long before the app. Long before the algorithm. Long before any of us were doom-scrolling at midnight wondering where the last two hours went.

His name was Thich Nhat Hanh. And he figured out the tic toc thing about fifty years before Silicon Valley did.

I picked up Peace Is Every Step about twenty-five years ago — one of those books that finds you at exactly the right moment and then never really leaves. Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, a poet, a peace activist. During the Vietnam War he was so committed to reconciliation that both sides exiled him. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He spent decades living and teaching at Plum Village, his monastery in — of all places — France. He passed away in 2022 at 95, still teaching, still writing, still breathing slowly on purpose.

The book is almost disarmingly simple. Short chapters, three pages at most, one idea at a time. No jargon. No doctrine you have to buy into first. Just a very quiet, very clear voice saying: the present moment is where your life actually lives. Try to be there.

The thing I carried out of it — the thing I still use — is a mantra so simple it almost sounds like nothing until you try it.

Breathe in. Bring all the peace you can find down into the deepest part of your body. Fill up with it.

Breathe out. Smile.

That’s it. The whole practice. And the first time I did it and actually paid attention, I understood why he’d built a monastery around the concept. The smile isn’t decorative. It’s a signal — to your nervous system, to your face, to whatever part of you is wound tight and catastrophizing — that right now, in this exact moment, everything is okay. The anxiety doesn’t disappear. It just loses its grip for a second. And sometimes a second is enough.

A few years after reading the book I found out that Thich Nhat Hanh had established a community in the United States — Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, just outside San Diego. I couldn’t believe it. The book that had been sitting on my shelf, dog-eared and underlined, had a physical address forty minutes from where I lived.

I went on a Sunday. He wasn’t there — I didn’t expect him to be — but what he’d built was absolutely there.

It started with a walking meditation up a gentle hill. I’ll be honest: my first instinct was that this was going to feel like slow calisthenics with good PR. I was wrong. There’s something that happens when you walk without a destination, without a podcast in your ears, without your phone in your hand, paying attention only to your breath and the ground under your feet. The noise inside your head doesn’t stop exactly — but it drops to a frequency you can live with.

After the walking meditation there was a dharma talk. Then the community moved to the kitchen together to prepare the meal. Everyone worked. Everyone ate together in near silence. The monastery itself — a former boys and girls camp transformed into something sacred — had a quality to the light that I haven’t forgotten. Wood and windows and a kind of intentional stillness built into the architecture. You could feel what the space was for.

I drove back to San Diego quieter than I’d arrived. That’s the only way I know to describe it.

Here’s the thing I keep turning over: Thich Nhat Hanh was writing for TikTok before TikTok existed.

Three pages per chapter. One concept. Digestible, immediate, complete. The format he chose wasn’t accidental — he understood that attention is finite and that the most generous thing a teacher can do is respect that. He didn’t write a 400-page treatise requiring a graduate degree to decode. He wrote something you could read in ten minutes on a lunch break and carry with you for twenty-five years.

Sound familiar?

The irony is that TikTok — named, presumably, for the clock, for the present moment, for now — is one of the most effective presence-destroying machines ever built. The scroll has no end. There is no breathe in, smile. There is only more content, engineered to keep you anywhere except here.

And yet. The format itself isn’t the enemy. Short, clear, one idea at a time — that’s not the problem. The problem is what fills it.

I’m not suggesting you delete TikTok. I’m not suggesting you drive to Escondido and walk slowly up a hill, though I’d recommend it. I’m just saying that somewhere between the tic and the toc, there’s a breath. And in that breath, if you want it, there’s a little bit of peace.

Breathe in. Fill up with it. All the way down.

Breathe out. Smile.

Put the phone down, just for that second.

Thich Nhat Hanh spent 95 years teaching the world that the present moment is not a destination. It’s where you already are. The only question is whether you’re paying attention.

Tic toc.

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