Thoughts on Peace-Seeking…

After decades of looking in all the wrong places

I’m sure we’ve all had the notion that everything could be better if we could just get away. A vacation, a break, a “she-shed” or a fishing trip. We wonder, where can we go to find peace?

It’ll never work. Peace is never somewhere else. It’s here, now. It’s where you sit at the breakfast table, signing the children’s papers to get them off to school, or right where you sit at work, taking a break to call potential doctors, rehabs or therapists for your loved ones. It’s there when you pick up the phone to talk to a friend who is distraught. Suffering.

Peace lives with us. In us. It’s accessible, incubated in our excessively human frames where we navigate life the best that we can. Peace is in the pause. The breath. In gratitude.

Peace lives inside of awareness. And acceptance. If we are blessed, it can live in the actions that proceed from our quietest moments.

Peace is in the dark silence, the stillness, and in the not-running-away. It’s in the primordial smile that comes up during prayer when we realize, that we have slipped out of acceptance. Again.

Peace sits right here in the room with us when we abandon the futility of resistance to reality and say, yes, this is what’s happening and I’m still OK.

Peace is the blanket wrapped around our shoulders and chins as we’re safely tucked in for another dark night alone, and it’s the incomprehensible rest available to all of us when we take that deep breath of acceptance (breathe…breathe…breathe) and ask for help.