Healthy Times Ahead
The Quest for Peace
I have been thinking lately about how to achieve peace. I figure that if I had peace - a deep and lasting inner peace - I wouldn’t be affected by sadness, depression, or bad things in general. The bad news in life would just roll right off my back, and I would keep going on my way. Wouldn’t that be awesome? To stay centered in every moment. This must be the ultimate achievement in life.
Through deduction I have decided that this may not be the right goal. The question may be, is it even possible to achieve peace? When you consider all the religions, yogis, spiritual leaders, personal growth books and brands of beer, you start to see a pattern. As a whole, mankind seems to have this one fundamental quest, to achieve peace. We want to get along with others. We want to be happy. We want to have awesome, worry-free relationships. We want to feel relaxed and certain about the future. All of these things are touted to be a direct result of “peace.” Is this possible? Is it even necessary to expect such elusive outcomes?
The interesting fact of the matter is that most honest people admit that they typically don't experience inner peace for more than a couple minutes at a time, until something comes up that causes them to crash-land back into this world. Moments of peace. But is this really peace or just momentary happiness?
Yes, I will go farther to say that lasting inner peace may not even exist. Our attempts to seek it may be in vain; a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. People who claim to have the answers - who set themselves apart as our teachers - are typically as stressed out as anyone. They may be skilled, even brilliant, yet are subject to the same harsh realities as the rest of us - the pain of our existential awareness, the lack of a suitable, objective answer to the meaning of life. Those that don’t confront these issues at all may be the happiest. Once you ask life’s tough questions and experience the lack of an answer that satisfies your deepest uncertainties, how do you pretend you never did?
And what are we afraid of? Are we afraid that if we aren’t in peace something bad will happen or that we simply can’t deal with the idea that the world may just not be prone to peace to begin with? We are all trying to run this race with the same goal in mind. We step on each other for it, take advantage of each other for it, serve only ourselves for it, and kill each other for it. Is it worth it? What hard work it is to constantly strive for something that is impossible to attain!
What would life be like if we actually stopped looking so hard, stopped trying to convince ourselves that peace is possible? What if we just accept that life is complicated, hard and unfair? People are animals trying to survive in a competitive, imperfect, uncertain and often uncaring world. That may be the closest we can come to peace; giving up our expectation that peace is our birthright and accepting, as much as we can, the hard realities of life.
In this light, taking care of ourselves, especially our health, seems more important than ever.
Tobi Ann Dufau, Publisher