Peace Amid the Anxieties of Daily War

DAYS off are not necessarily a blessing, nor are days at work necessarily a curse. Peace may evade the one, but be positioned centrally in the other. Yet, as per joy, peace is an enigma. So much of our peace belongs to the mind; procuring and possessing it through mastery of thought, of letting go, amid experience. And only for the now.

Like many of you I suspect, I’m easily confounded by time and task pressure; the whirlwind of competing priorities and the contracting concertina of time. At the one extreme I’m bored, at the other I’m barraged. And it’s a fine line that separates the two.

It’s humbling how fragile I am when it comes to the circumstantial. And yet, without such relentless stimulus, the life unabating, I would never have learned the powers of the mind that can superintend, and be salubrious for, the vulnerability of my heart.

Peace is an enigma, a paradox, a never-ending conundrum. Yet is it ever available. Those realities seem genuinely opposed, but they’re once and at the same time true as contradictions of reality.

Peace seems impossible when the present brings several competing pressures simultaneously, but that circumstance is merely the invitation to slow down and enter the phenomenon of process — doing one thing at a time through attentive discipline.

The goal of peace within the limits of time and space makes us face an irrepressible reality. We cannot shift dimensional law to come into conformance with our whims. Expecting these laws of time and space to bend our way is absurd, but it’s common that we get frustrated when we find we cannot cram more into less. We simply need to see how futile it is to expect the impossible.

When we accept life is a war, peace is the armistice we go wilfully into battle for.

Peace and Anxiety

For peace to be our possession there first needs to be the awareness of our anxiety.

Denying anxiety is pointless. Acknowledging it is the first step of embracing it as the next step toward reducing it. To common anxiety we can say ‘no!’

The simple effect of employing calming strategies that are within continual reach proves we can lessen anxiety or nip it in the bud for the definitive moment. Of course, there’s no long-term solution other than the mastery of that which we easily devise and employ; but, that which is only for now.

Accept that peace and anxiety are possessions of the now. We may have one as much the other. Peace takes no more work. So why do we allow anxiety free reign?

Prayer for Practicing Peace

Father,

as I come before you,

help me accept my war,

to You Whom all is true,

give me peace now to explore.

AMEN.

Life is a war, but it’s not to physical death that the battle seeks to take us. It’s a war of attrition. Life’s purpose is not to wear us down. Its invitation is for us to reconcile the tensions and arise, acknowledging anxiety as the precursor to peace, for without the one we wouldn’t passionately seek out ways to attain the other.

What better way to address anxiety than look up into the skies and ponder possibilities.

***

We can only find peace within the eye of the storm. It’s the only place amid chaos that’s dead calm. It’s the place of the mind at the core of the heart. When chaos swarms and threatens to overthrow all rationality; where reasonability seems impossible.

In the storm, move toward the eye; the stillness within the fury; silence in the howl. That place is found in the absence of our mind. Experience through the senses.