The Peace You Are Looking For
A peaceful state of mind is everyone’s birthright, so it’s strange how we regard it as something elusive, something that can only be captured if circumstances are just right.
How much time and energy do you spend looking for peace? Like a great deal of what we search for, without knowing we’re doing it, we almost always look in the wrong place; outward, to external circumstances and conditions.
That doesn’t stop us from continuing to look in the wrong place
The sobering fact is, we never find it there, except fleetingly. That doesn’t stop us from continuing to look in the wrong place. We don’t look inward for peace because we don’t expect to find it there, and who thinks to look for something where they don’t expect to find it?
I imagine this has happened to you: you misplace something (with me, it’s always my glasses) and you concentrate on looking for it in all the places that seem logical to you. After you’ve exhausted the logical places to look, it might occur to you to look in the “less logical” places, where, as if by magic, you find the thing you’ve misplaced.
Whenever this happens to me (believe me, I get lots of practice) it stops me for a minute. In that pause, I find myself reflecting on how emphatically sure I had been about the place I didn’t have to bother to look. That’s right, the place where I actually found my glasses.
What’s this have to do with finding a sense of peace? We can only find abiding, lasting peace by looking in the last place we’re likely to look: inward because that’s where peace lives.
Hard to believe isn’t it? Underneath our revved-up, busy minds, peace lives. But because our minds are revved up so much of the time, that revved-up state feels normal, and it doesn’t seem possible that deep, abiding peace could live there.
Peace is built into every human being
Peace is built into every human being. Ironically, the harder we look for it, the less likely we are to find it. All that looking and searching insure that we won’t find peace, and we’ll only succeed in further revving up our minds.
The single way to find the peace I’m talking about is to let your mind slow down. In other words, stop struggling to find peace, and let the peace you’re made of find you.
Finding peace this way makes it sound like it doesn’t involve doing a lot, does it? That’s the whole point. It’s all the doing, and searching, and yearning that revs up our minds in the first place.
Ask yourself this: do I find peace when I’m actively searching for it, or when the abiding peace I’m made of comes over me?
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