Longing for Peace

It’s a noisy world – and it just keeps getting noisier. The really puzzling thing – for me – is that so many other people seem not to be troubled by the noise. In fact, some folks actually find silence disturbing. Silence means being confronted by our own thoughts perhaps – so is it this that disturbs these people? Or maybe there’s a more mundane explanation – if you’ve been brought up surrounded by noise then the absence of noise is bound to feel disconcerting. Then there’s another kind of ‘silence’ – the silence of a forest or a deserted shoreline. Of course, such places are full of ‘sound’ – and most of it is not ‘noise’ – that’s an important distinction. But I fear that many folk would still find such places disconcerting because of the absence of human sound. I wonder about all the shrill and shouty voices – the excessive assertiveness. Is it about not being heard by our politicians and by civil society? So, people somehow think they can compensate by just being really loud in everyday life! Of course, it’s never going to work – we’re unlikely to feel any better – just by shouting. But still, maybe this explanation helps to make sense of a lot of the noise. Silence – or the lack of it – of course, is about an outer peace. Peaceful surroundings normally mean quiet surroundings – peace and quiet. Everything that I’ve said above is really just the theory of peace. But now we need to ask – what is peace in practice? The wider circles of peace are peace in our own hearts, peace in terms of our relations with other people and peace in our relation to Nature and the Cosmos. So, silence out there in the world is the outer peace. All the rest – I’d hazard to suggest – are about inner peace. What does it mean to have inner peace – peace in our hearts? I think it means freedom from the traumas that afflict us as a result of the two most entrenched and egregious problems of humanity – hierarchies of power and structures of violence. Trying to navigate these – which are likely to invade every aspect of our lives – can be a source of anger, and thus lack of peace. Anger stems from fear, grief and despair. Peace – the inner peace of our hearts and our dealings with our fellow humans – ‘resolves’ these issues in two ways. Peace lets us step away from hierarchies of power and structures of violence and : peace allows us to accept and be comfortable with our fear, grief and despair. I put ‘resolves’ in inverted commas here because to promise a lasting peace – like suggesting we are ever truly at home – is to offer an unobtainable goal. Anger is useful sometimes, but very often it turns quickly to rage. So: yes, sometimes it’s very difficult to decide what is best to do in any particular situation. But, suffice to say, acting in anger (or really from rage) is never going to work. Other than that, it’s a matter of continually examining our hearts: Where are we with fear, grief and despair? Where are we with peace, joy and love? No power games – no violence? It’s not so difficult at the individual level. It’s always possible to walk away – to do something else – something that will be a win-win for oneself and for others. Peace with Nature? The first thing to help us here is to appreciate that we have a relationship with individual and specific aspects of Nature, not so much with Nature in its totality. And the first, and most intimate, of those relationships is our connection to our own bodies. We could say that the root of all violence in human culture is the disruption of this – the interference and control of who we are in our own bodes and in our emotional selves. But this is problematic. If we could somehow free ourselves from such interference then it’s difficult to know what our behaviour would be like – it’s difficult even to say if our behaviour would be human. And, in this, we reflect the wider paradox of existence, which we’ll come onto soon. Likewise, I think we face similar dilemmas with Nature that lies outside ourselves. Wild Nature seems to reflect what humans regard as both good and bad behaviour, as well as being just amoral. And it’s difficult to know what to make of this. In the end I think we have to just sit quietly in Nature and look and listen carefully, without coming to any judgements about what’s going on. Perhaps this will change us – but likely any changes will be in subtle ways that cannot be expressed in words. What then of peace with the Cosmos? It would be nice – and I guess, this has been my driving force for some time – to come up with a theory, cosmology or theology for the Universe. This, in turn, would inform all our behaviour – morality, ethics, culture, meanings, purposes. But, even getting to this stage, if that were possible, might not actually resolve things in the neat way that I’ve suggested. Even those with, say, a fundamentalist religious faith only really succeed in their efforts to have answers for all of life’s problems because their beliefs are superficial. I get the impression that – even though at the cosmic level there may be harmony – at the human level there is always paradox. So, peace with the Cosmos comes down to being at peace with paradox. The paradox of our own human nature is extraordinary – sometimes, it has to be said, tragic – but often also very funny. Everything then is provisional, ambiguous and paradoxical. And, dear reader, you may be asking yourself how we might ever find peace in such a world, let alone take any action. Again, I can only end here by saying that, whilst we work for peace, we are best not to expect too much. Instead, just enjoy small peaceful episodes that come along from time to time. And, faced with the paradoxical, contradictory nature of our fellow humans let’s not ask them to change! Let’s just love others and let change happen to them, and to us, if and when it will.