Never Let Them Steal Your Peace

The past week, we all collectively watched,

held our breath,

prayed,

spoke our minds with opinions of what’s right and wrong.

I feel, just as deeply as ever, that we are not at war with what’s right or wrong, good or bad/evil.

We are at war with what we are no longer willing to tolerate in the name of PEACE.

The horror is so unfathomable that I can not look at the news. Instead, I look to the closest people in my life who have taught me about the real horror of war through their own eyes to get a better understanding.

In times like these, I can’t help but think of my dad, who had to deal with the horrors of being one of the ones that had orders in a war that he didn't believe in and ultimately had to make a choice to follow through killing innocent people, including women and children. He told me, and I experienced firsthand, the living hell he lived in for many years after he made those choices.

I feel for those now on either side who have to make the hard choices to survive.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the main character, Arjuna has to consider going to fight against his own family and sits with Krishna (God who is in disguise as a chariot guide). This epic story contemplates the battles we fight on both a macro level in the unseemly wars and the micro level that happens unseen within us.

The message is the battle is all a reflection.

We feel on a deep cellular level because we were also the one who pulled the trigger, the one who was raped, and the one that fled and left our loved ones behind. We consciously and unconsciously feel all of these pains as one, yet feel conflicted from shame and guilt.

Now the question is,

what are WE willing to stop tolerating to claim our peace??

Some choices we have now…

We can choose to stop engaging with media and the politics that control us to keep us fighting,

We can choose to stop our egos from aligning with the “right” side to further distances ourselves from the “other”,

We can choose to stop taking orders to bomb one another.

It is our choice.

It is our collective choice in how we want to arrive at peace.

We can choose to make love, to create beautiful things, despite the tragedy, to laugh louder, and to play bigger even when the bombs go off.

I remember someone I loved very much showed me the pictures he took in Iraq. His job was to document the war that was happening. The photos were very unexpected. They were of little girls in their most beautiful dresses, celebrating with parties every day while a house next door was still smoking from the bombs. When he asked the families why this was so, they responded because,

“Why not? It might all be our last day on Earth. Who wouldn't want to see children smile in their last moments?”

Those images will forever be embedded in my heart because why not? Why wouldn’t I want to have the memories of little girls in pink frilly dresses laughing and playing in what could be their last moments or…something a lot more horrific?

Which image do you want with you for eternity?

Now is the time we stop sensationalizing war to create more divisions. Now is the time, we collectively decide that “they” will no longer take our peace away from us and make new choices that create connection, unity, and peace on Earth.

I am grateful I have never been in a situation where I had to make extreme choices like what are some now but I will share a hard choice I did have to make early on in my life.

When I looked the devil in his eyes, I saw that he was only acting from a place of deep pain and trauma.

I also saw that he was one that made me and I had a choice to become him or choose PEACE.

And I would like to think that because of my choice, eventually he found PEACE too and died with it.