A peaceful life can’t be provided for in a comprehensive way. Taking care of the imagined future, for instance, or reaching out to the larger surroundings to insure security and comfort, a certain way of living. These efforts are doomed.
How to have a peaceful life really comes down to a very small thing: how to have a peaceful moment. This is doable. It is, in fact, the only thing that is.
It’s the idea of trying to control or arrange or predict the circumstances of a life that is doomed to failure, doomed to just generate more uncertainty and anxiety. Not that a person can’t decide to live in one neighborhood versus another, or enter into this relationship but not a different one. It’s that no matter what you’ve laid out for yourself for circumstances, despite the big-picture choices you’ve made, the experience of profound well-being still comes down to what the moment is like.
A peaceful life comes down to a small thing: having a peaceful moment.
Because that is where life is actually experienced — in the present moment — and so it’s only right now that radical rest can occur, in a bodied way that feels authentic. Real. Delicious! Oh so delicious.
Every moment you live, the longed-for condition can come to be, regardless of the immediate circumstances. This is a radical idea. It flies in the face of so many assumptions.
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What most of us do (what I did for decades) is try very hard to establish ourselves in a situation — living, working, loving — where we imagine we will be all right, maybe even happy. The assumption is that how we are inside is determined by what’s going on around us, in our lives.
This approach can seem like the only possible one. It goes largely unquestioned. (You would do well to be aware of anything unquestioned. Often that turns out to be the juiciest of all spiritual practices: to look hard at such an assumption.) There are a couple of problems. One is that everything is uncertain. You may have noticed this. No matter what a person sets up for circumstances, chaos will always be a factor. Change is inevitable.There is no possibility of absolute stability.
We don’t want to admit this to ourselves. So there is this low level of anxiety around the edges of all we put into place to assure happiness. All we have to do is look back over the most recent stretch of time to notice how very few things turned out the way we’d hoped or imagined.
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The other problem is that however stable the set-up seems to be over any stretch of time, life still comes down to How does THIS moment feel? In other words, even the most successful provisions for outer well-being say nothing about how the person is doing on the interior in any given now. Even when the physical health is good, and there are rewarding things to do with time, and the economic and political situation seems safe and satisfying, and there are beloved companions, even then, the present can feel uneasy for more reasons than anybody could ever list, most of them having to do with the havoc-wreaking mind.
There are people who feel altogether content, moment to moment. It’s worth looking at that, and asking how it comes about. It’s also worth asking Could this be me? And this: What’s the difference between their experience and my own?
The distinction doesn’t have to do with a difference in circumstances. It’s not that the person living moment-to-moment infused with joy and well-being is existing in some other world, someplace different from the one you’re in.
Nor are they unaware of the disasters swirling around us all. Denial is not keeping them at a comfortable distance from poverty and violence, a decaying economy, and an environment in peril.
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How all of this bothers the mind, this notion of a person entirely okay, even in the midst of widespread disaster. Aging happens, as ever, and death is known to be certain. How can such a one remain entirely unruffled in it all?
If chaos and change are unavoidable forces, if very little is under a person’s control (and even that tiny bit could change any second now), if an awful lot is wrong with the larger world (and with the personal part of that world), how is it that a human being can be entirely tuned into reality and be at peace?
Reality has something to do with it. Whatever is immediate has a lot to do with it. Attention is key. And allowing: that is the heart of it all.
Peace is generated when a person’s attention is on the immediate and there is no resistance, no mental commentary. Something in the body of a human being recognizes the truth in all this.
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It’s about the plain recognition of what is real. The simple act of acknowledging the fact of a thing brings about a sensation of well-being. Of sanity! Attention acknowledges reality, sans mental commentary.
Note that the experience of peacefulness has nothing to do with whether we like or approve of what the immediate moment holds. The instant any part of attention is siphoned off to the mind (which wants to have an opinion or to resist what’s happening), peace flies off like a frightened bird.
Thinking-about and attending are not the same. Thinking is processing. Attention is being-with.
Be with what is, my friend. So simple. Yes, not so easy. But guess what? In the sweet moments that this occurs, you may register how blessedly at rest you are. Seeing that profound ease just may remind you, next time you’re prone to hurry ahead, to hold still for a wee bit. Ah . . .