I don't do any of those things anymore. It's not that I don't care, but I don't like what being a part of that creates in me. The more deeply involved I get with a cause the more I lose the ability to understand how anyone else could believe differently and the more upset I feel at what's going on.....and I become just as intolerant and angry as the people who hold whatever belief I'm protesting.
Raging for peace does not work for me...neither does looking outside myself for things that are an inside job. I cannot expect the world to hold a peace that I often struggle to create in myself.
I have seen my snarl on the faces of others holding peace signs. I have heard my anger in the voices of friends and strangers when they talk about current wars and their desire for peace. But what do they really mean by "peace"?
Many of them seem to be talking about an idyllic world where no one fights about anything, there is no violence and all aggression has been supplanted by love. It's a beautiful fantasy, but not one I'm willing to give much energy to even though I understand how we got here. We are living in world that seems filled with violence, anger, aggression and power over. The human tendency is to go from one extreme to the other in order to find the middle. So many of us respond to the violence we see in the world by fleeing into a comforting daydream of peace.
But isn't this the same old either/or dichotomy that created the lack of peace in the first place? When we put two things in an either/or model, we set them against each other and they are in conflict. Peace vs. war sets up a conflict where peace is at war with war.
When I hear people talk about a peace that involves purging ourselves of every aggressive impulse two things jump out at me: a) if we get there, we'll be extinct and b) we've lost touch with how we came into this world.
If our ancestors had succeeded in purging themselves of aggression they wouldn't have survived. They needed aggression to kill the predators who wanted to eat them and to hunt for food. We may not be living in a situation where we need those instincts to surface in the same way. However every time we stand up for ourselves and set boundaries, we are relying on a different aspect of the same instinct.
Aggression, violence and anger are as innately a part of the human species as love, joy and compassion. Our entrance into this world comes in an explosion of beauty and violence. Even if your mother birthed you surrounded by loving family and friends, she was probably yelling and swearing because birth is not gentle. And after spending nine months breathing water in a protected environment, you were ejected into a world of rampant noise expected to breathe something different right now or die.
If a world at peace is a world devoid of all internal and external conflicts, what happens to our creativity? What happens to music, art and poetry? Art that touches us deeply is birthed from conflict. It is an offering made from dancing with tension, from wrestling the core of conflict until it is made visible.
What would happen to us in that idyllic world? Physiologically, stress pushes us to step out of our comfort zone and make changes. Without the stress of internal conflict, what impetus would we have to evolve and grow?
For human beings, recognition is based on differences. We know the water in the shower is hot because we’ve felt cold water. We know what feeling peaceful is because we’ve experienced conflict. If peace was the only experience we had, we’d cease to recognize it and it would lose any meaning for us.
The idyllic descriptions I’ve heard of a peaceful world remind me of what I was taught about heaven in Sunday school. Heaven was all lounging around in bliss, harps and holy beings. Even as a kid, I thought heaven sounded boring. I still think I’d be terminally bored in a completely peaceful world.
I’m not sure what my personal definition of peace is. I know it’s an inside job that can radiate out into the larger world. I do believe peace is inclusive; doesn’t depend on repression or wiping anything out. It is expansive enough to include aggression and conflict and moving through them both to a temporary still point, which will unravel again. I have a hard time imagining nations at war if those nations were filled with people who made space for the movement of their own aggression rather than externalizing it.
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