What is Peace?

Tough question. Rest assured this is not my attempt to answer that question. It’s just my take on what I have experienced when it comes to peace.

First and foremost, I can’t say that I fully understand what it means. The word itself has changed over my lifetime. As a child growing up in the late 70’s and 80’s I mostly saw the word “Peace” in pictures of protests during the end of the Vietnam War. I know the peace symbol and I always connected it with the image of flower girls pushing daisies into the barrels of police officer’s rifles. It was cool and while I remember those thoughts and ideas, they only held my attention for the time I looked at the pictures. Past that I didn’t really think about it much.

Teenage years and early twenties didn’t bring much change to my view of peace either. Peace was talked about on the news, and “Peace in the Middle East” or at least the hopes of it were a recurring theme. I just remember a bunch of videos of smart bombs blowing up targeted strikes on grainy black and white new stories. That, or soldiers coming home in coffins having given their life for our country.

I don’t think I am alone in that my understanding of peace or at least my thoughts regarding it, but for me peace dealt strictly with the external. Nothing personal to me, but just a rubber stamp of how things could be better for the world if we had it.

Then came addiction. Real addiction with real ever-evolving consequences. Consequences that seemed to grow exponentially worse with each tried and failed attempt to right the ship.

I definitely know what the absence of peace is. I lived it. I was waging war in my mind against myself and I was losing. There was no peace. As I am writing this I get the sense of how important those wars in my head were to get the full understanding of what life without peace feels like. It’s awful. I wouldn’t want anyone to have to experience the anguish I did living with addiction. There were depths I reached from which I could not see myself making it back.

 Then God happened. The mere fact that I wrote that sentence leaves me dumbfounded. But it’s the only thing that I can look to that can come close to explaining what it was that put into motion the events that I know saved my life.

God’s grace introduced me recovery. It’s been the impetus for a period of real introspection in my life. I started meeting people with eerily similar stories to my own. I noticed that I was drawn to folks that had this thing about them that I did not really understand, but I felt like I really wanted. Peace. I kept hearing people talk about it, but I could not comprehend them. They might as well have been speaking Swahili for all I knew because I just didn’t get what they were saying.

But I wanted to.

The voices in my head towards the end of my addiction were loud. The repetitive “You’re not good enough! You don’t deserve this life! You’re a terrible person!” was the echo chamber from which I could not escape. So, I did the only thing I could do. I listened to the people I started to meet. If someone said do “x” and you will receive “y”, I did it. I had to. I think the only real positive thing about getting the absolute shit kicked out of me was that I was willing to do anything to quiet the negativity in my head.

I prayed. I found out about meditation. I started to exercise. Body, mind, soul. All of which were broken but this new path was going to show me how to fix it.

Mediation is one of the things that I decided to throw caution to the wind and try…because “why not?” Nothing I was doing before worked so let’s give this a shot. Meditation is weird. A foreign concept. My first few experiences were wrought with confusion. “Am I breathing right? Am I sitting right?? Am I doing this right??? Is the fact that that I am asking all these questions ruining my experience???? This sucks! How do people do this? It was awful, and it was awfully hard to do. But I kept at it, which led me to experience something this morning that was incredible.

Peace.

I run three miles early every Saturday morning, then take 20 minutes to do a guided meditation. I find the endorphin fueled goodness of a run immediately followed by 20 minutes of reflection is an absolute sweet-spot for me. So back straight, on my knees, facing the pond in our neighborhood from my backyard in my mediation posture, I close my eyes and relax. It’s hot. The air is still, and at 6:30am on a Saturday morning its quiet save the birds having their morning conversations.

My guide is the app I use, and he asks that I begin with my eyes open. Halfway through the instruction I’m told to close my eyes and focus on the visual field behind my eyelids. Then he asks to think about someone I love.

My first thought is of my 13-year-old son. We had shared an incredible evening two weeks prior and the thought I had was of him laughing uncontrollably at a restaurant where we were having dinner. He was falling over in the booth laughing, we both were. I can’t remember why we were laughing. It doesn’t matter though, because that image of the joy in his face is all that counts.

As the image fades I find myself completely calm and at rest. Then it happens. It’s hard to put into words but whatever the least perceptible flow of air necessary for me to feel a breeze suddenly engulfs me. It’s constant. It’s good. It felt as if I was walking through a wall of feathers with just the slightest of touch.

It was peace.

True peace. In that moment it felt like I really understood what peace meant. In that moment I felt nothing else. It was a moment I will not soon forget. Then it was gone.

It didn’t matter that it left as fast as it came because I felt it. I experienced it and I get to keep that moment with me forever. It also made me realize something. I don’t think my goal is to be peaceful twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It’s not possible and I sure as hell wouldn’t appreciate it.

That moment was enough. Enough to tell me I want more of those moments. I believe God gave me that breeze. He gave me that moment to say “Hey, I see you. Know that I am here with you.” And that’s magical. It also reassured me that my life as I live it now allows me to recognize those moments. That’s an ability that did not exist in my past life. Those voices that haunted me were too loud and unending, they didn’t allow me to hear anything else. But those voices are gone now.

In their place is love. Love of me and of the man I am becoming. A love for, and recognition of, God’s Grace which he gives freely to me. A love for my family, my wife and my boys. I have been given peace or at least an understanding of what peace means to me. I want more moments like that, and I believe God wants to give them to me. I just need to follow Him to those moments and appreciate every second of them.