Most people don’t go looking for uncertainty. It arrives on its own, in the form of a job that disappears, a market that shifts, or an accident that rearranges a life in a few seconds. The useful question is not how to avoid it, but how to stay steady inside it. Glenn Wayne Trede, who is from San Diego, California, has spent much of his life working on that question, starting at 17, when he left ordinary teenage life behind and entered a monastery.
He stayed three years, practicing yoga meditation and working toward a conscious awareness of our oneness with God. That period did not remove hardship from his life. What it gave him was something more portable: a way of training attention that he could carry into every setting that came afterward, including a hospital bed, a trade school classroom, a corporate service call, and a restaurant kitchen.
What Three Years in a Monastery Actually Teach
The popular image of monastic life is escape. Trede’s experience points somewhere else. Those three years were not a retreat from the world so much as a training period, and the training was mostly repetition: the same practice, at the same hours, whether or not it felt productive on any given day.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to find inner peace in an unpredictable stretch of life. A practice that only happens when a person feels motivated is not a practice, it is a mood. The value shows up later, when conditions are bad and the habit runs anyway.
Two things are worth borrowing from that model. The first is a fixed time. Attaching meditation, prayer, journaling, or quiet reading to an hour that already exists in the day removes the daily negotiation about whether to do it. The second is a low bar. Ten honest minutes that happen every day will do more for a person’s steadiness than an hour that happens twice a month.
The other lesson is subtler. Sitting still for long periods teaches a person to notice their own attention wandering and to bring it back without drama. That skill is not spiritual decoration. It is the mechanical basis of staying calm, because most panic is attention running unsupervised into the future.
Rebuilding When Life Changes Without Warning
At 21, shortly after leaving the monastery to see more of the world, Trede was in a motorcycle accident that left him with brain trauma and two broken femurs. The six years that followed were unsteady in every sense. He moved between part-time jobs, working as a security guard and later as an aircraft parts inspector and shipper, and dealt with the physical and emotional aftermath at the same time.
There’s no shortcut in a period like that, and it would be dishonest to describe one. What the story does offer is a workable posture toward hard years. Recovering after a serious injury rarely follows a plan, and the people who come through it tend to shorten their time horizon rather than lengthen it. The question stops being “where will I be in five years” and becomes “what can I do well this week.”
The jobs he took during those years were not the career he wanted. They were the work available, and doing them was what kept the recovery moving. That is worth saying plainly, because a common source of anxiety is the belief that any step that is not the ideal step is a wasted one. Six years of ordinary work taught him adaptability, which turned out to be more useful later than a tidier resume would have been.
How Glenn Wayne Trede Turned Discipline Into Momentum
In 1986 he enrolled in a computer technology trade school and finished with a 90 percent GPA. That result was not luck. It was the same repetition applied to a different subject, and it opened the door to a technical career.
Working as a computer technician, he moved into a managerial role and handled work for accounts including Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Department of Water. On one occasion he made an overnight service call from Los Angeles to Maryland to correct a mistake someone else had made. Nobody is calm on a flight like that because they have mastered their emotions. They are calm because they know the equipment.
This is the part of the subject that gets skipped in most writing about inner peace. A large share of everyday anxiety is not a spiritual problem at all. It is the reasonable discomfort of being underprepared. Learning the thing properly, whether that is a trade, a system, or a household budget, removes a category of worry that no amount of breathing exercises will touch. For Glenn Wayne Trede, the meditation and the technical competence were never separate projects. Each one made the other easier to sustain.
Nature, Water, and the Value of Absorbing Activity
Glenn Wayne Trede regards gardening and the natural world as close to divine, and his history with the outdoors is long. He surfed from sixth grade through high school, played baseball in Little League and on into high school, and spent a couple of years playing football.
Those activities share a quality worth noticing. Surfing a wave, weeding a bed, or tracking a pitch all require full attention on something physical and immediate. There is no spare capacity left over for rehearsing worries. It’s a different route to the same place that meditation reaches, and for many people it is an easier entry point.
Anyone looking for a starting practice could do worse than choosing one absorbing physical activity outdoors and protecting time for it every week. It does not need to be dramatic. A garden bed and a pair of hands will do.
Curiosity as a Long-Term Stabilizer
Trede’s interests now run toward maritime and aeronautical sciences, including navigation and the principles of aerodynamics. He treats learning as ongoing rather than as something with a finish line, and he credits that habit with keeping him engaged and energetic.
There’s a practical logic to this. A person whose sense of self depends on one role is exposed when that role changes. A person who is always partway into learning something new has somewhere for their attention to go. Curiosity isn’t just enjoyable. It can be a hedge against the kind of uncertainty that arrives uninvited.
His own record suggests he’s applied that flexibility widely. He and his wife have managed an 18-unit property and owned a Chinese restaurant that won a best restaurant award in their community, and a stretch of work as a delivery driver turned dispatcher was one he credits partly to his monastic training.
A Simple Place to Start
For readers who want something concrete, four things stand out from this story:
- Pick a fixed daily time for a quiet practice, and keep the session short enough that it survives a bad week.
- When circumstances break, shorten the planning horizon and take the useful work available rather than waiting for the right work.
- Treat competence as part of calm. Learning your field properly eliminates worry that no relaxation technique will reach.
- Keep one absorbing physical activity in your week, preferably outdoors, and keep learning something you have no obligation to learn.
None of it’s complicated. It’s just repetition, which is the part most people skip.
About Glenn Trede
Glenn Trede is a computer technology professional from San Diego, California, who spent three years in a monastery practicing yoga meditation before training as a computer technician and moving into management. He and his wife of 30 years have run several ventures together, including an 18-unit property and a Chinese restaurant recognized in their community. His interests today range from maritime and aeronautical sciences to gardening, part of what he treats as a continuing process of discovery.
