wanting peace

After enough ups and downs in this world, most spiritual seekers realize they want peace. It's a sensible response to suffering, great or small. But the only way to bring it about is to value peace more than everything else. You can't want anything more.

It's much easier to say you want peace than to mean it. In fact, part of saying it is discovering all the ways you don't mean it. That's what saying it is about. You say you want peace, then you watch all the ways you contradict yourself afterwards.

Keep your eyes open and take stock of your actions. Pay attention to the ones that push peace from your life. Those are the ones with your true values hidden in them. Ask yourself what you valued more than peace to wind up without it.

Sometimes the answer is funny. Sometimes it's daunting. Most of the time it's something you didn't realize you valued at all, certainly not more than peace. Things like anger, or being right, or saving five minutes—to leave more time for peace!

The important thing is seeing what happened. You sacrificed peace for something else, and now you can decide was it worth it? If not, your priorities are clarifying in the direction of peace. You are that much closer to meaning what you say about wanting it.

Once you mean it completely, you won't need to say it anymore. Peace will stay with you, and the one who talked about it will no longer be needed. That voice in you will fade away as one more example of things you once put before peace, and learned not to.