There Comes A Day...

I wrote these words on 22/02/2022. As I typed them out, a part of me could hear the naysayers ready to pounce with a “well, isn’t that an entitled viewpoint.”

In a world that is desperately hellbent on splitting us at the seams from birth through to death, to get to this point of peace (and I am by no means saying that I’m perfectly there by any stretch) requires more than just lip service. I requires more than preaching “we are one” and “we’re in this together” and expecting others around us to do the work and change every time conflict arises.

In 2019 I shared the following thought on my social media after teaching a meditation class with a group of young Emirati, South African, Australian, Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, Romanian, Saudi children (and more):

Shout out to the souls raising children for the peace wave rather than the war machine.

The reality is that that group of children taught me far more than I could teach them. This week, I found myself returning to these words and wondering: “How on Earth have we (you, me, I) looped back to this lesson?” But that is the nature of life on this planet. Tests return until we truly master the lesson. And these words don’t just apply to war in the sense that we are conditioned to focus our awareness on.

It’s every single moment of internal and external conflict that we enable in our day.
It’s the battle we have with ourselves when we look in the mirror.
It’s the fight we have with our friend/parent/spouse.
It’s yelling at our children to hurry up because of “time”.
It’s getting worked up in traffic.
It’s dobbing on your neighbour.
It’s mask wars, gender wars, identity wars, race wars, medical wars.
It’s any way in which us versus them shows up in your day.

And it doesn’t simply stop because someone else performs according to my/your limited view of perfection.

It stops when the sun rises and you get up and commit, not simply to peace, but to connection.

It stops when you stop allowing your energy to be sucked down the drain, diverted or siphoned.

You unplug and unglue yourself from media conflict p$rn, war p$rn, fear p$rn. And connect with life in front of you, beneath your feet and above you. Plug into that and you become a channel or conduit of… well… life. A power station, shall we say?

Yes, some will say that’s entitled or privileged in times like these. I’d say it’s vital.

Why?

Because when you stand back and really look at it, whether you waged a war on: Your neighbour, fat rolls you hate, wrinkles you frown upon, omnipresent bacteria, viruses, cancer, a disease, a disorder, another country, the colour of a person, a gender, a label, a food group… you suddenly realise that you had waged a war on yourself. The war was simply an attempt to not face the very real message and lesson you were being asked to look at.

A message that there was a part of you (a short circuit shall we say), crying out for love, crying out for connection.