For generations, we’ve aspired to an ideal of “world peace,” yet nobody really knows what that actually means. The truth is, we don’t know what peace is. We don’t know what it would take to have or maintain it, and we most certainly aren’t willing to do what’s necessary to make it ever come close to being a reality.
But, we’ll keep writing the same books about it, generation after generation. We’ll keep regurgitating age-old wisdom, again and again, yet nothing will ever change — for what we think we know; what we think we’ve learned; what makes us right, makes them wrong. As long as we maintain the need for “wrongness”, we maintain the need for violence, separation, distancing and dissonance.
So, let’s stop lying about it, to ourselves, and to our children. We don’t want peace. We’ve just been talking about it as if we do. We can’t have peace until we’re embodying an elevated state wherein we can truly take on another’s concerns as if they were our own. But that’s not who we are today; we lock our doors, compete for space and resources, and we allow the malevolent few dictate, maintain and manipulate narratives on our behalf. This merely affords us a sameness and familiarity within which to fight each other. How can we not see this?
What do we truly want? We want to feel safe. We want to feel like we’re living on purpose. We want to be of service — to our values, our ideals, our dreams, and our friends and families. We want to be able to trust someone — anyone. More importantly, we want to be able to trust ourselves. We want to believe in something powerfully enough, hoping it will stabilize and ground us firmly when the storms and torrents blast away from all directions; when life continually proves to be an untamable tempest, we’d better get used to it.
But we don’t want peace. Nor do we want progress — at least, not the corporate kind.
We want to know something for certain. We want to know what’s real. We don’t know very much at all today. We pretend to, relying on search engines and media and our “smart” devices to provide us our knowing. That’s data, information, biased, curated and dead knowledge. To really know something is to live it, and to surrender to the wisdom that our knowing will forever be changing. It will always adapt, mature, refine and reconfigure itself. The more we try to convince ourselves and others that we truly know something, the more we’ll have to take up arms.
Water knows something for certain. Be like water.
Your child knows something for certain. Just look into their eyes.
What do you know for certain? You know you will die. You know it’s your choice as to how you will live. Regardless of the happenings, influences, mentors, teachers, rapers, users, abusers, manipulators and other psychopaths or sociopaths we may come across… it is still our choice as to how we will live this life.
The Earth? She’ll be fine. I promise. The climate is changing, just as it has for billions of years. Anything we’re doing to it now can be erased within a millennium. Regardless, there is no need for hysteria or panic. That’s the big lie. Life is in no hurry, and we humans have only been around for a very, very short time. If you’re concerned about it, CHOOSE TO LIVE DIFFERENTLY.
But peace? It’s not in our nature. Like happiness, we can have it from time to time, but the idea that it’s anything permanent, stable or solid, is an illusion. The human experience requires contrast, but not necessarily conflict. It requires magnetism, but not necessarily polarization. It requires presence, but not necessarily immortality.
One life, many directions. One life, many stories. One life.
Solvitur ambulando