I read this post on Steve Whitehead’s blog and it got me to thinking about inner peace and what we find peaceful. Then, as I sat in the Sunday morning service at the Unitarian Universalist Church here in Charleston yesterday, I began to consider it again. OK, so my mind was wandering a bit, but it seemed appropriate at the time. In the story from the above blog, the king says,
“peace does not mean to be in a place where there
is no noise, trouble, or hard work. Peace means to
be in the midst of all those things and still be calm in
your heart. That is the real meaning of peace.”
I began trying to relate this to my own life. I must admit that recently I have been trying to find peace by finding a way to withdraw myself totally from the noise and trouble. What I have begun to come to realize is that I need to find my own peace, my own way, within that noise and trouble. If you look at many of the people we admire, such as Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy or whomever, we admire them not because the extracted themselves from noisy and complicated situations, but because the were surrounded by those situations and yet had an inner peace that allowed them to rise above and transform some of that chaos into order.
Now I am not saying that I can do this on any of the order of magnitude of those gentlemen, but I don’t have to. And neither do you. What we do need to do is rise above the chaos in our own lives so that we can view it in such a way as to be able to make sense of things and take some control. Scratch that. Control is too definitive a word. We need to be able to offer guidance in situations that are beyond our control.
As I was writing this and preparing for another hectic workday, I pulled up one of my favorite blogs, Zen Habits. I try to do my writing and reading of blogs in the morning before work as it helps to focus my day. Anyway, today’s entry at Zen Habits is 17 Unbeatable Ways to Create a Peaceful, Relaxed Workday. How serendipitous, and a great way to start the day and the week.
So tell me, where to you find your peace, and what do you do to help create it?
