Before he became the commanding general who would lead the Union Army to victory in the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was a young officer stationed on the frontier in Texas. One night he and several soldiers were riding through a wooded area when a terrifying sound broke the silence.
From the darkness came loud, desperate howling. The sound echoed through the trees and seemed to surround them. The men grew uneasy. Based on the volume and the way the sound carried through the woods, they estimated there must be twenty wolves nearby.
Fear began to take hold.
Grant, however, kept his composure and suggested they ride toward the sound instead of away from it. As they approached, the howling continued just as fiercely. The men braced themselves for a pack of wolves.
But when they reached the source of the noise, they discovered something unexpected.
There were only two wolves.
Grant later reflected that the sound had echoed and multiplied in the darkness, causing the men’s minds to create a far greater threat than what was actually there. What felt like twenty wolves was only two.
The mind had done what the mind often does: it magnified fear.
How many times do we do the same in our own lives?
A difficult conversation becomes a looming disaster in our thoughts.
An uncertain future turns into imagined failure.
A moment of discomfort becomes a mountain of suffering before the event even arrives.
In truth, many of the wolves we fear exist only in the theater of the mind.
Eckhart Tolle speaks often about this dynamic. He reminds us that much of human suffering comes not from the moment we are actually living in, but from the mind projecting itself into a future that has not happened. We mentally rehearse the worst outcomes, creating anxiety long before the situation arrives.
In other words, the mind hears two wolves and imagines twenty.
But something remarkable happens when we return to presence.
When we step out of the swirl of thoughts and come back to the breath, the body, the moment we are actually standing in, much of that imagined suffering dissolves. We begin to see the situation as it truly is—not the version our fearful thinking constructed.
Presence brings us closer to reality.
And often, when we approach the thing we feared with clarity, we discover what Grant and his men discovered in the woods that night:
There were only two wolves.
Scripture speaks to this same truth:
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
— 2 Timothy 1:7
A sound mind does not deny challenges. It simply refuses to let fear multiply them.
Life will always have its wolves. Difficult moments, uncertainty, and trials are part of the human journey. But when fear and imagination are allowed to run unchecked, we often suffer far more in our thoughts than we ever do in reality.
The invitation is simple.
Come back to the present moment. Stand where your feet are. Look clearly at what is actually before you. Most of the time, the forest becomes quiet again, and the truth reveals itself.
There were never twenty wolves.
Only two.
Closing Prayer
Lord, quiet the noise of fearful thoughts that echo through our minds. Help us return to the stillness of the present moment, where Your peace lives. Give us the sound mind You promised, so that we may face life with clarity, courage, and trust in You.
Amen.
