Finding Peace

Hi, it’s Tammy here! In these times, more than ever, we really want peace in our beautiful world, so maybe we can ask ourselves: what is happening, and why isn’t the world at peace?

First, we might find that it’s too easy to blame society, or some group outside of ourselves. It’s too easy to say that we are advocates of peace, but that we are powerless in the face of what the powers that be choose to do in this world.

We tend to think we are separate from the world and the other people in it. But are we, really?

Aren’t we actually deeply connected to everything and everyone around us?

I think that one of the reasons why peace eludes us is that we seem to have a mistaken idea about peace. We might notice that we think about peace most when we feel we are under threat, say, the threat of war. In this way, then, we are putting peace and war on the same playing field; they are dancing together in our field of consciousness, so that the specter of war is never far from apparently innocent desire for peace.

Sometimes, “peace” becomes more of an impossible dream rather than something we can work to achieve. Things get difficult, so we become nostalgic, and yearn to return to “better times”, to the “good ol’ days”, to how things were before they got tougher.

Hindsight tends to look more golden. Our youth, or even the preceding few years, become soft around the edges, a safe space we have distilled for their most ideal moments. Scared of the present, we re-imagine the past as a sort of heaven.

The good news is that the best place for us to live in is also the only place we can be: right here and now, in the present moment. Here we have every chance to look deeply within ourselves to see where our fears come from, and figure out how we can make changes to help bring about a more peaceful world.

So how do we begin to turn things around?

Maybe we can ask: do we really want peace, or do we want the luxury of returning to our comfort zones, where we keep the world at bay and hope that all the terrible things we are scared of don’t make their way to us? Are we really ready to do the hard work of finding the peace in us that is also the real, true, lasting peace of the world?

We can only ask these questions in a space of stillness. We must rest in quiet reflection to see what peace and calm really look like, so that we can imagine a real harmony in ourselves and with everyone else in the world. From there, maybe we can imagine whole countries also feeling the way we teach ourselves to feel, in perfect stillness, where we only wish for good things, for all people and nations of the world.

I guess what I really want to say is that I believe we all really want lasting peace. But peace isn’t something we can merely wish for while going about our daily lives and not doing much to effect real change in our relationship with the world. Rather, peace is something we uncover, and discover in ourselves. It is possibility and potential that we all have. We can figure out that it has been there all along, and once exposed, it will grow and expand and guide us to make wonderful decisions. And this is the building block to a peaceful world.

Today’s expression: “eludes us”

Things elude us when they escape us, or we cannot grasp them. I wrote above that “peace eludes us”, which means that we cannot seem to find peace in our lives.

Tamara

カメラ片手に世界を旅し、世界を切り取り続けるジャーナリスト。空いた時間に、持ち前のおもてなしの心を持ちながらバリバリ仕事をこなすハードワーカー。