Where do you find peace? Where do you find comfort? Is it looking at old pictures or movies? Is it from watching your young children (or anyone's young children)? Is it remembering past vacations or outings? Can you find peace by just sitting on your couch? I have a friend who says you can...if you try. So I'm going to try!
Peace isn't going to come up and hit me over the head; that would probably be more like War anyway. It's not going to come gently tapping at the door or call me on the phone. It will only come if I call it and will only be with me if I allow it to stay. So how do I call it? Or more importantly perhaps, how do I get it to stay? How do I maintain inner peace once I achieve it? I think I'm stressing myself out even more just trying to figure this out!
Maybe, just maybe, I'm over-thinking it. Maybe my friend is right. My friend, by the way, is a professional trainer and physical fitness coach so he may actually know what he's talking about. Maybe I do need to just sit on the couch, breathe, clear my mind, and let peace in. The sitting on the couch part will be easy; I do that a LOT! Breathing? No-brainer!! Letting peace in sounds pretty doable too. It's the clearing of my mind that I think will be the tricky part...but I'm not going to over-think it. I'm going to try. If it doesn't work the first time, or doesn't last (good things never do without effort, right?), then I'll try it again...and again...and again.
In a perfect world, once we climb the mountain and meet the Dalai Lama, we are rewarded with knowledge and inner peace...we will understand the meaning of life and be forever at peace because of that knowledge. Now, in the real world, our mountain peek is always just out of reach or our Dali is balanced precariously on a bed of gravel and each time he starts to tell us the secret, we slip on the gravel, falling just out of hearing range. Or maybe, even if we make it to the summit and we hear with perfect clarity what the Dali has to say, by the time we travel back down the mountain and back to our everyday lives, the meaning of life...of our individual lives, has changed and we have to turn around and start the climb again.
I ask God often for peace and although I know He's listening, and I know He does and will help me, I'm thinking He may help me more if I help myself more. He'll see me making an effort and hopefully make it less and less of an effort as time goes by. So no more thinking about it and planning to start tomorrow!! I'm off to the couch to breathe!
