The Movement of Peace

In the face of war, in the face of adversity, in the face of loss, I see Fate. An energy ever strong, ever present, ever staggering. I gasp at her power and I lose faith in the road to Destiny.

I question myself immediately, Is this road possible for me or other people?

I feel disempowered, small, empty. I am sheltering in. I employ my fantasy and I watch happy movies and anything with happy visuals from a world of silly worries and trivial pursuits. I escape in tidying up my house, clearing up my desk and taking lazy days in bed for no reason.

As the world keeps turning fast, I pace myself to my slowest or even to my fastest but surely not to my most conscious one. I go out of balance. And I caress my guilt for destroying my plans, my discipline, my diet, my well envisioned and cared for regimen, because there is another crisis in the world, in my house, in me.

In a truly connected modern world of digital virtual proximity, where we can see and hear everything even in the most remote parts of the world thanks to all of our visual and auditory devices, on line and on real time, it is inhuman not to be connected. Our new normal underlines a constant connection of information and also of compassion.

This week alone I found out how my friends in a war zone are surviving their day, how my friend in another country returned to a burnt down house due to a sudden electrical malfunction, how my other friend cannot spare even a ticket to the cinema due to costliness, another one apologized for not coming to our on line meeting due to losing a parent and needing time to process, two of them having their parents hospitalized for battling diseases.

Weeks like this one, I lose all faith, all courage, all sight for the future. No inner tactic works, none of the art forms can come to my rescue; all is belittled, all seems hopeless, I cannot but surrender to sadness and darkness.

I am saved purely by the mechanics of my rigid schedule; I am always on a project, and projects have deadlines and people expect me to be there, to lead, to take action, to provide a vision, a direction, a hug.

And I ling onto that, mechanically, by virtue of my auto mode. With no time to read or hear the news, I employ my mind only to organize, co-ordinate and support. Small scales projects, affecting some tens of people but every single one of them to their core, for life. And once I can see one hundred percent breakthrough in the participants’ eyes, I let my heart breathe. I feel human for a day again. Small, yet human, mortal yet in use of a higher benevolence, and for a reason that feels unapologetically good.

When I ponder upon the size of difference between the few tens of people assisted by those projects in comparison to the millions that suffer every day, once more I feel small, insignificant, a toy in the hands of a world that I cannot understand. I go out to nature, I plant some trees. When I think of the number of trees cut down, burnt or flashed away that day, I collapse again. I cannot win this mind game; it is obvious that is a trap, but I have been entering into it, day after day. I am still in it. This is my magic maze where I keep hitting my head on its walls, screaming for a way out.

A maze needs a thread; one destined to remind me that the purpose of entering is to discover unknown potentials of a most intimate wisdom and not to inhabit the maze or be bewitched by its apparent complexity.

I do not know what is possible for our future. What is possible at any given moment for myself, for anyone, for humanity. All this violence circles back to our societies, as a guest that we have been inviting repeatedly, despite criticizing him and laughing at him with resentment, frustration and anger.

My life so small, so insignificant, a maze of nothings produced with hard work that leads to useless results. This is a circle of violence that is inflicted upon my everything. With no love, nothing but a maze of violence appears and reappears, through different events, but with the same annihilating powers.

Life when I do not tolerate the violence of no-love for myself, will lead to life that I do not tolerate the violence of non-love for others. It is always hard to get a healthy clarity from the walls of a maze. But this feels a moment of clarity, a thought naked of emotional adhesives; this feels like our wars; our non-love that keeps everything in the small prospective of a very repetitious movement of self-obliteration. When I do not tolerate the lack of love for myself, I do not tolerate the lack of love for all others; this ferocious energy of non-tolerance, an act of war to all that is not love, reveals that is only the other side of the real movement to peace.

My life is small and insignificant but I have a chance to discover how life is when I do not tolerate the violence of no-love for myself, which means that I won’t tolerate the violence of non-love for others and from what I ve seen so far in life, I am walking out the movement of war to the movement of peace.