What does it mean to have peace?

For me, peace is everything. It is the overarching principle after which this whole blog of mine is named, after all. So much so, that I use peace as a yardstick for measuring how my day went: did I have peace in abundance? Or was I missing it? Peace is out there for us all, it is comforting, and it is needed, if we are to make our way successfully on this earth.

Before we venture any further down this road, we must agree on a definition of peace. I do not mean it to describe the interim between war, the down-time where all seems calm, on the surface, tension bubbling like stew underneath. My understanding of peace is one of a deep-rooted sense of contentment - a feeling of safety, like an impenetrable bubble. Not bliss per se: bliss is fleeting, and the idea of it, in my mind, is one that does not coexist with life’s troughs, only its peaks, and even the most naive of us knows that that is not how life goes. Where light is shone, shadows are cast. And that’s just simple physics.

Peace is also deeply personal. It is something we carry with us; therefore we need to find it and nurture it from within. Depending on others, or on material possessions, for our sense of peace will only set us up for failure. Insofar as we move through life, the only thing with a truly permanent presence in it is our self, and our relationship with our self. The ways in which I cultivate peace in my life may be very different from someone else’s; the main thing, however, is that we each tend to our garden in our own way, and do not expect anyone else to come do it for us.

Fostering a growing sense of peace requires certain traits. It does not fall from the sky like Irish rain. To achieve this peace, this contentment, and to make it stick, I believe we need 4 qualities: discipline, honesty, acceptance, and patience.

  1. Discipline: In order for peace to become a lifelong presence, we have to care about wanting peace and accept the fact that we need to work to attain it. M. Scott Peck, psychotherapist and author of 'The Road Less Travelled' reiterates the need for suffering, sacrifice and challenge after challenge if any meaningful spiritual growth is to occur for the individual. As stated in the introduction, it is no-one else’s job to hand you peace. You must go out there and cultivate it of your own accord.
  2. Honesty: This involves being straight up with ourselves - recognising when we let our negative, ticker-tape thoughts run amok, and rob us of peace. Blaming others for things going wrong in our lives when maybe it is something we are doing, or enabling those around us to wreak mental terror on us instead of putting much-needed distance between ourselves and them. Complaining by week’s end about all the work we have to do that we didn’t get time for during the week, when maybe if we were a little more honest with ourselves we’d realise all that time we spent scrolling our social media feeds and passively binging series could’ve been spent doing those jobs that are now causing us stress and thus moving peace out of reach.
  3. Acceptance: Peace grows in abundance when we accept ourselves as we are, and stop expecting perfection from ourselves. I refer to an earlier idea about light casting shadows. For all the good parts of our character we must accept that there are also parts we're not mad about. Wanting to work on those is totally okay, and learning to love them is infinitely rewarding. Towards the end of 2019, I found that I felt incredibly lonely. Everywhere I looked I saw couples in love, groups of best friends hanging out and having the craic, sisters and brothers spending meaningful time together… and I felt so alone. Fast forward to this year, the year of Time Spent in Own Company. Not only have I now accepted the fact that I spend much of my time on my own, I actually relish it. Those evenings where it’s just me and whatever novel I’m reading, or me and a crossword puzzle, or me and my fiddle with the laptop open ready to learn a new tune… It is in those moments that peace is plentiful.
  4. Patience: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was a lasting sense of peace. ‘All the things that are worth doing, take time’ - Mos Def.

Okay, so work on these four traits, get them up to scratch, and peace is yours forever, right? Oh, wrong, my dear, so very wrong. There is plenty out there that can screw up our feeling of peace, namely: negative thoughts, negative behaviours, and a chaotic environment, be it physical or figurative. When we are dogged by negative thoughts, whether it's our self-talk, or putting words in the mouths of others, it is like a roaring inside our skulls: this is the antithesis of peace. Behaving in a negative way, such as engaging in gossip or bitching, contributes towards nothing and robs you of time you could have spent doing things that bring you peace. As for the part about chaotic surroundings, I found during the initial COVID lockdown that I harvested peace from activities such as folding, hoovering, tidying, and general domestic-goddessing. Neat and tidy living space meant neat and tidy headspace. Since I couldn’t control what was happening in the big bad world, I focused on what I could control within the four walls of the house, and it is unknown the amount of peace that was gained from simply folding some clothes, baking protein bars, and compulsively wiping down every available surface. 

I may seem like I am at peak living with all my folding and meditating and novel-reading alone in my room, but, I kid you not, I am a work in progress. The pursuit of peace is ongoing and will never be fully finished, for life ebbs and flows, things get in the way, and people change, including ourselves. I like to think of this quest for peace like a walk in the countryside, along a dirt track. Peace was all those nice moments where you noticed beauty - the colour of the leaves, the streaky clouds hovering above your head, birdsong. Navigating the trickier parts of the trail or weathering the elements were the times you weren't explicitly focused on peace but were simply busy. Peace was still there, humming in the background while you dealt with whatever task was before you. Because, you see, trials and tribulations appear, and always will. Life is not plain sailing. We can’t dedicate every waking second to self-care and peace-pursuing, but we can still look up from the phone screens and the stress and the deadlines and the errands every once in a while, and notice all that is good in life.


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