PEACE X

You long for peace, yet there is no such thing as peace. It is nothing. Peace is simply the absence of troubles and worries. Troubles and worries are your attempts to control the future. You are given a chair to sit in, but instead you break it up for firewood in case you get cold, or use it as a torch to help you look around a corner. Forget the future it is only a dream. Sit in a chair. Find your rest. If you forget the future you will have no trouble in the moment-this now. Anything that disturbs you is in the future. Sit down and there is no trouble now-or now-or now-or now. Make your life a series of nows that is how you were meant to live.

Do not make a goal of inner peace. Peace is the absence of war, the cessation of hostilities, the end of striving. You go spinning around, fighting with yourself, with others, or with life itself. If you stop the fight you will find peace. Peace is not something to achieve. You cannot fight your way to it; It is something you do. You always have a choice: to fight or be at peace.

You stop the fight when you stop acting as if you are different than you are and stop your longing for what others have. You try to be someone else because you do not think you have the strength to do it yourself. But you do.

Being yourself means being old when you are young, young when you are old. It means not looking at the peak when you start to climb that mountain. Being yourself means trusting in your ability and using all the strength you have. Being yourself means not dissipating your energy on petty things. When there is striving, cleverness and wanting, there is no peace.

You are like a dirty infant who is playing in the mud. You are obsessed with the desire to have as much mud as another child. You wallow around getting dirtier all the time. Yet you are a royal child. You have everything you need for the adventure of life.

Come now. Wash your face. Walk out into the garden. Sit in your chair. Rest. Be still. While you have been int he mud, the tree and the wind have been dancing together. Look at them. How beautifully they move together. No matter what happens to them, all will be well. For they are being themselves. They are not acting like things they are not. Neither are they denying what they are. You are a wind to the tree, and a tree to the wind. Be yourself. Do not live beneath your nature and all will be well with you.