It is well with your soul.

It's true, and I bet you can even remember a time in your life when you knew it.

“What is your life’s truest moment?”

That was the question I was most eager to ask at our first book club of the year. We’d read Wellness by Nathan Hill, and I’d highlighted more than two hundred passages in the novel, but this was the most intriguing of all:

“He told Lawrence that when you’re dying, it’s normal to feel anxious and angry about it, and that some people find it helpful to relax and breathe and focus on moments of their lives.”

“Like, happy moments?”

“No. He told Lawrence to focus on true moments.”

“True moments. What does that mean?”

“Times when he was the most himself. He said that everyone has a deep feeling about who they really are, something underneath everything else, something that doesn’t ever change. And he asked Lawrence to describe a moment when he felt like that.”

“What is the memory that represents you at your truest?”

I’d asked my wife that question, and she told me a story I hadn’t heard in our twenty-two years of marriage. She’s in middle school. It’s a summer evening. The house cat has just given birth to a litter of kittens. She’s curled up in her bed, with kittens tucked into the various nooks and crannies of her body, reading a book, a warm breeze coming in through the open window. She was surprised by the memory because she’s such a social person and that was such a quiet moment.

I told her mine was a quiet moment, too. It’s the last day of fourth grade. The sun is setting. I sneak out of the house and walk back to the schoolyard playground. I sit on a bench. There’s not another soul around. And I reminisce about all of my favorite memories of the year with my friends. I make up a cheesy chorus to go with the remembering: “Those were the moments, those were the days.”

At book club, another extrovert in the group also offered up a memory in which he was alone, quiet, and peaceful. In the end, none of the memories reflected anything about what we’d think of as our “identities.” Was that a coincidence, we wondered? Or was it telling us something important about who we all really are? And what exactly was the common thread running through each of those memories? Here’s what I think it was:

It is well with my soul.

You may recognize that as a lyric from a hymn written by Horatio Spafford. In the late 1800s, Spafford lost much of his fortune in the Great Chicago Fire, while his four-year-old son was dying of scarlet fever. Believing his family needed a getaway from the grief, he sent his wife and four daughters on a ship to England, with plans to join them after wrapping up his affairs. The ship sank and all four of his daughters drowned. He immediately set sail for England to join his wife and, during the journey, he was notified the ship was passing over the oceanic grave of his daughters. Allowing the grief to flow, he penned the words that would become one of the most well-known hymns of all time:

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll—

Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to know

It is well, it is well with my soul.

There is a deep knowing, it seems, in the center of our being, that we are okay and everything is going to be okay, regardless of what chaos, loss, and pain surround us.

And every once in a while—on a warm summer night enfolded in kittens and the pages of a good book, for instance, or an early summer evening on a solitary playground accompanied only by the memories of good friends—that soulful knowing comes to the surface. And this knowing may, in some mysterious way, be even more central to who we are than any identity we might construct.

So, now I come to you with the same question. What moment in your life reflects you at your truest? Your okay-est? Your it-is-well-est? I invite you to use those reaction icons below to share your memory in the comments or Restack this article. It might just call up that soulful knowing in someone else, as well.

And a community of souls who know this truth is a pretty good place to be.