The Biggest Piece of Peace

Cannot be hunted down like strappy summer sandals.

Abs of steel, the best blueberry muffin recipe or monumnetal career milestone. Peace is not out there. I continually forget this. It seems absurd to me that peace is patiently waiting inside my petulant prickliness.

There? Really?

How could peace possibly survive my feeling fat before I go to a party? Or irritated not a single person in our house can transport their sneakers from where they come off their feet to the closet that is their rightful home?

Surely, peace cannot exist here.

Peace would be more likely to live in some less slum-like there. You know with less run-down feelings and graffitti’d over thoughts. In a hypothetical there that at the very least has a welcome mat.

Here’s the thing.

There is no there there.

Just here and here and here. And here.

Like a goldfish completing another lap around my small bowl, this fact continues to surprise me. Each time I discover peace can only exist where I am, here, now, in this place it is like an endless first.

Strangely familiar and surprisingly new.

Like Dory, in Pixar’s new animated film, Finding Dory, it seems we are all, in some way, trying to remember what it feels like to be at home (in our bodies, hearts, minds and spirits).

Doesn’t seem like that should be so hard.

To be at home, inside ourselves.

But it means accepting ourselves for who we are – not just the few parts we feel okay about. Even writing this sounds like fluffy woo-woo. But the self-rejection runs deep.

Acceptance is right up there with forgiveness for degree of personal difficulty regarding self. It requires a totally alternative perspective. My sneaker neurosis? Not merely a manifestation of my crazy, impatient ranting.

But rather, the shadow side of my love for order, my respect for the beautiful home we’ve created and my passion for spirited collaboration.

My insecurity about feeling fat?

More complicated on the surface, but essentially the same. It’s not merely about my leftover childhood fear of being judged as less than, being dismissed based on external appearance.

Fat is simply the emotional weightiness of predicted rejection.

Feeling fat is the flipside of my longing to connect, to be part of a community, to experience a sense of belonging for who I am and to embrace others for the same. No different from anyone else regardless of impeccable façades.

None of us are immune.

No matter how confident, smart, beautiful, charitable or zen any of us may seem to others, we are all just swimming in this tumultuous, peaceful, beautifully complicated sea of humanity.

In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” T.S. Eliot says:

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

…

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

We are each of us, all of us, in process. All the time.

Each moment a new piece of the peace puzzle. A new opportunity to roll with whatever is, to bear-hug the present with our whole heart.