This thing called peace.

This thing called peace.

I learned something about Peace recently.

I think there are two sides to the coin. On one side, there are things that steal our peace away from us. They can be times and events when other people have hurt us, damaged us, stolen from us something that was sacred. Wounds, sometimes deep ones. Sometimes so deep we can’t even put a finger on who exactly it was that hurt us, but we know it happened. Maybe it wasn’t even some deep mistreatment, maybe it was a lack of teaching or care. Maybe someone just didn’t look out for you when you needed them, maybe you were forced to learn a hard lesson, that someone could have taught ahead of time.

Often times I find, on this same side of the coin where peace is stolen, the way we have been hurt and neglected leads to our own failure and mistakes. Heaping our own mistakes onto the mistakes of others in our past is a deep chasm in lacking peace. We want, and we yearn for a release from this soul ripping pain, we don’t even know what it is. Often we can find ourselves at this place I call ‘Again.’

Again, someplace where we don’t want to be, again. At the bottom of another bottle, again. On a web site, again. Having that same conversation, again. Angry, again again. Wishing, again, that we could get out, man up, stop, control ourselves, but again, failing.

Again, and again, and again.

This is a very uncomfortable side to this coin of peace, and yet it is VERY important that we look at it. It is very important that you ask questions about it. It is EXCEEDINGLY important that you bring some other people, to look at this side of the coin with you.

Why?

Because you more than likely won’t get anywhere on it by yourself.

How do I know that?

Well. Think about it. How is what you are currently doing working out for you?

If you currently feel like you are spinning your wheels, and this place of “Again” is kinda bugging you, then doing what you are currently doing now but harder isn’t really going to fix things for you, is it,? It is like loosing traction on a slippery road and stepping on the gas.

You need a tribe, a group of people that care about you that will look at this side of the coin, the side that speaks about the Peace that escapes us, and work on it with you. I plan on writing more on how to Gather Your Tribe in the future, so stay tune.

Now this other side to the  coin of peace.

I call this side – the more positive side, the side of Insatiable Peace.

It is like a bucket that gets filled up, and feels GOOD when it is full. Artists are perhaps the easiest people to look at in this regard. They take pictures, edit them, and present them to a client, and that client posts them to facebook, shares them with their friends on twitter, and prints them, hangs them on their wall, and come back to your website and makes positive comments on them…

All of that feels GREAT. It feels like, when you named this as a dream these VERY moments were that dream coming to true. And it feels awesome!

And then you wake up the next day, and the feeling is gone.

Why?

As much as I believe that the creator planted something inside each one of us, a dream, a gift, a passion, a desire. I don’t care if it is the good feeling you get when your house is clean, or when a baby gets delivered, or when you complete a perfect weld, or have a happy customer,  or a job well done, or a perfectly nailed training week, there is another thing the creator planted deep inside of us.

There is a hole in our bucket.

There is a hole in our bucket and that is a gift?

Yes. This is why I call it Insatiable Peace. Something magical happens when we lay our heads on our pillows at night. A new day dawns, and we get to wake up, and while we have the memory of our bucket being full, the bucket is empty again, and the memory really doesn’t do it for us!

If this didn’t happen, if the peace that comes at living out our dream didn’t leave during the night, then, we would all be satisfied with yesterday’s efforts, and have no need to do anything ever again.

See I think we are closer to living out our dreams them we realize – it’s just that it isn’t something out there, that we are looking for. It is something here, something now. I believe that we see it better when our tribe helps us past our hurts and our hang-ups, when we can forgive ourselves. And when we can see this bucket that we have each been given, when we can discover it with each other, and when we fill it with each other in community, we have a better shot at being at peace.

Although, we will be in peace, in a different way, expectantly waiting for the peace that will always evade us.

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